Cookie Policy

This policy lists the cookies and similar technologies used on our marketing website at tideway.co and in the Tideway application at app.tideway.co, what each one is for, and how you control them. It sits alongside our Privacy Policy, which explains everything else we do with personal information.

A cookie is a small file a site stores in your browser and reads back on a later request. Local storage does something similar but is only ever read by code running on the page, and is never attached to a network request. We use both, for different things, and this page covers both.

Tideway is operated by Errant Technologies Inc., incorporated in British Columbia, Canada.

We group everything into four categories, and only the first is unavoidable.

• Strictly necessary. Keeping you signed in, protecting the sign-in form and payment pages from automated abuse, and remembering the privacy choices you made. These cannot be switched off while you use the Service, because switching them off is the same as signing you out.
• Analytics. Understanding which pages and features get used, so we know what to build and what to fix.
• Performance. Measuring how fast pages load and capturing the details of a crash so we can fix it.
• Marketing. Attributing a signup to the campaign that produced it.

There is no fifth category, and there is deliberately no advertising one. See What we do not do.

Strictly necessary

• __session and __client_uat — set by Clerk, our authentication provider, to keep you signed in and to tell the page whether a session exists. Session-length and short-lived respectively. On app.tideway.co only. These reach your browser from our own domain rather than Clerk’s, because we proxy the sign-in service through our origin so that a privacy blocker or a VPN cannot break signing in.
• __stripe_mid and __stripe_sid — set by Stripe when a page that can take a payment loads, to detect and prevent card fraud. Roughly a year and roughly half an hour. Stripe documents these on its own cookie policy.
• Cloudflare Turnstile — a bot check Clerk runs in front of sign-in and sign-up. It may set a short-lived token to avoid re-challenging you on the next page.
• tw_studio — our own cookie, set only for Tideway staff opening our internal brand book. Eight hours, scoped to a single path, and never sent to the application or the API. A customer never receives it.

Analytics — only with your permission

• ph_…_posthog — set by PostHog to recognise a returning browser and group its events into a session. Around a year. Used on both tideway.co and app.tideway.co. On the marketing site PostHog also records session replays and heatmaps of anonymised interactions; in the application it never does, and that is enforced in our own code rather than by a setting in PostHog’s dashboard.
• _ga and _ga_… — set by Google Analytics to distinguish visitors and sessions. Around two years. On tideway.co only — there is no Google Analytics in the application, and we removed the loader that once put it there rather than rewrite this promise. Google documents these on its own cookie page.

Performance — only with your permission

• Vercel Speed Insights — measures real page-load timings. It sets no cookie; it sends a measurement and nothing is stored in your browser.
• Sentry — captures the details of an error so we can fix it. It sets no cookie either. Where a page address could contain a private sharing link, we strip it before the report leaves your browser.

Marketing

• No marketing cookie is set on either site. Campaign attribution is a property recorded on an analytics event, so it rides inside the analytics cookie above and is governed by the same permission. If you decline analytics, nothing attributes anything.

Both the website and the application store data in your browser using localStorage, under keys beginning tideway-. This is not sent anywhere; it is read by the page you are on.

• tideway-consent and tideway-privacy-prefs — the privacy choices you made, when you made them, and the model that applied at the time. These are strictly necessary in the truest sense: without them we cannot remember that you said no.
• Interface preferences — your theme, view density, the tab you were last on, and similar.
• A working copy of your workspace. The application keeps your own business records on the device so it stays fast and keeps working through a dropped connection. That copy can include your invoices, your business and invoicing profile, your rates, your logo, and your contact, project and task records.

The working copy lives only in that browser profile. It is never shared with a third party, and it is cleared when you sign out, when you delete your account, and when a different account signs in on the same browser. If you close the browser without signing out it stays on the device until one of those happens — so on a shared or public computer, sign out when you are finished.

We work out your region from the country you declare and the coarse location our hosting provider’s edge network reports, and we take the stricter of the two, so a mis-declaration can never weaken your protection. Where we cannot tell at all, we treat you as needing to opt in.

• EEA, United Kingdom, Switzerland and Canada — opt in. Nothing outside the strictly necessary category runs until you choose. Refusing is exactly as easy as accepting: one click, on the same panel, with no extra step and no dark pattern. Once you have decided, the banner does not come back.
• United States and the rest of the world — opt out. Analytics runs by default and you can turn it off at any time, from the banner or from your settings.
• Global Privacy Control. If your browser sends a GPC signal we treat it as a binding opt-out everywhere, in every region. We record it rather than asking you again, so it survives your next visit.

Your decision on tideway.co does not carry over to app.tideway.co, and it cannot: browser storage is separated by origin, so one site can neither read nor write the other’s copy. You are asked once more in the application, which is the right outcome anyway — the application collects more than the website does, so a “yes” given to a marketing page is not informed consent for it.

You can revisit your choices at any time, and turning something off takes effect immediately rather than at your next page load.

• On the marketing site, from the Privacy choices link in the footer of every page.
• In the application, from Settings → Data & privacy, where each category is a separate switch.
• In your browser, by blocking or clearing cookies for these sites. Blocking the strictly necessary ones will sign you out and keep you signed out.

This list is as much a part of the policy as the one above, and we would have to change this page to start doing any of it.

• No advertising cookies, and no ad networks. We do not run ads, we do not place a pixel for anyone who does, and we do not build advertising audiences.
• We do not sell or share your personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising, as those terms are defined by California and other US state privacy laws.
• No session replay in the application. The app renders your clients’ personal data, and for that data we are your processor — watching a recording of it would be processing outside your instructions, whatever the analytics value.
• No analytics inside your documents. We do not read the contents of your invoices, notes, files or messages for analytics, ever.

We update this page when we add, remove or repurpose a cookie, and the date at the top says when that last happened. If a change means something non-essential would newly run, we ask you again rather than treating an old decision as covering it.

Questions about this policy, or about anything else we do with your data: [email protected]

Errant Technologies Inc.
422 Richards Street, Unit 170
Vancouver, BC V6B 2Z4
Canada