Legal Agreements
Your platform operator can attach agreements — a privacy policy, terms of service, a marketing opt-in — to the screens that create an account. When they do, those agreements appear as checkboxes you tick before your account exists, and every decision you make about them is kept as a dated record you can read back from your Profile.
If your operator has published no agreements, none of this appears anywhere. The sign-up screens, the profile page and the sign-in flow are exactly as documented elsewhere, with no extra boxes and no extra step.
Where the checkboxes appear
| Screen | What you see |
|---|---|
| Accepting an invitation | The checkboxes, above the submit button |
| Onboarding after a Google or GitHub sign-in | The same checkboxes, in the same form as your name and organization |
/signup (self-serve, email step) | No checkbox — one passive line, e.g. "We'll email you a sign-up link. See our Privacy Policy." The agreement itself is asked for on the screen that actually creates the account |
| The re-consent screen | Only when an operator republishes an agreement — see below |
Required and optional
Each checkbox is one of two things, and the form says which:
- Required — marked with a red asterisk. The form will not submit until it is ticked. This is enforced twice: the page blocks the submit, and the server refuses the registration if the box is missing.
- Optional — marked
(optional). Leaving it unticked is a decision, not an omission: it is recorded as Declined and you can turn it on later from your profile.
Ticking a required box is a condition of holding the account. Once you have accepted one you cannot withdraw it from the portal — see Withdrawing.
Reading the linked documents
The sentence beside a checkbox can carry links written by your operator. Two behaviours, decided per link:
- Opens in a new tab — for a document hosted somewhere else. Your form is untouched: everything you have typed stays typed and the box stays as you left it.
- Opens in a dialog — for a document on this site. It opens over the form and closes back onto it.
Either way, opening a document never ticks the box for you.
If a box is missing when you submit
The submit is blocked before anything is sent. You get two things at once:
- a message on each box that needs attention — "Please accept this to continue."
- a summary underneath the form naming how many are outstanding — "One required agreement is still unaccepted — see the marked box above.", or "2 required agreements are still unaccepted — see the marked boxes above."
Nothing you typed is lost, and for an invitation the link is not consumed: fix the boxes and submit the same form again.
If the wording changes while you are reading it
An operator can republish an agreement at any moment, including while your form is open. If that happens between the page loading and you submitting, the submission is refused and the page says so:
These agreements have been updated since this page loaded. Please read the new wording and confirm again.
The form then re-fetches the new wording, re-renders it, and brings the boxes back unticked. That is deliberate: a tick you made against one sentence is never carried over to a different one. Everything else you typed is kept.
If the agreements cannot be loaded
If the portal cannot read the published agreements, it says so and keeps the submit disabled rather than showing you a form with no boxes that the server would refuse anyway:
We could not load the agreements you need to accept, so this form cannot be submitted yet.
A Try again link retries the read. Once it succeeds the boxes appear and the form unlocks. The self-serve /signup email step is never affected by this — its passive line simply does not render.
When an agreement changes
If your operator republishes an agreement and asks for existing users to re-accept it, you are stopped the next time you use the portal and shown a single screen:
Please review our updated terms We have published a new version of the agreements that govern your account. Read them and confirm to carry on.
- Every outstanding agreement is on this one screen, with the same checkboxes and the same links as the registration form.
- Accept and continue records them all in one go and returns you to the page you were heading for.
- There is no "skip" and no "later" — typing a portal URL directly still lands you back here. Sign out instead is always available, so you are never trapped.
- If you leave a required box unticked, nothing is recorded and the screen stays up.
- If an operator withdraws the request while you are on the screen, you are released rather than held: "These agreements have changed since this page loaded. We have refreshed them for you."
Two things this screen never does:
- An optional agreement never blocks you. If an operator republishes a marketing opt-in and asks for re-acceptance, you are not redirected anywhere; the request shows up on your profile instead.
- It never comes before onboarding. A brand-new single sign-on account that owes both finishes onboarding first, then meets this screen.
Your record
The Legal & consents section of your Profile lists every decision you have ever made, newest first, with the wording, the version, the date, and the screen it was collected from.
The record is append-only. Changing your mind adds an entry; it never edits or removes the one before it, which is why a document you have gone back and forth on shows an Earlier decisions list underneath its current state.
Declined, withdrawn, accepted
Three words, three different facts:
| Label | What happened |
|---|---|
| Accepted | You ticked the box |
| Declined | You left it unticked — something never granted |
| Withdrawn | You had accepted it and later turned it off |
Withdrawing a consent
Only optional agreements carry a toggle. Flip it off and a new entry is appended reading Withdrawn; flip it on again and another is appended reading Accepted. The earlier entries keep their original timestamps.
Required agreements show a Required chip and no control. They are conditions of holding the account, so ending them is an account-closure conversation with your operator rather than a switch on this page.
An agreement your operator has since retired still appears with the decisions you made about it. The record outlives the document.