# 02 — The register

The product. *"The refund is the pretext that generates the data and the record of who answers is the asset."*

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## 1. The question, and why it is the design's sharpest move

> **"Do you hold a record of my usage of this service?"**

Non-use is unprovable in the direction that matters; whether they *hold* the record is answerable by every company, short, comparable, concedes nothing, and produces a table on day one. The second question — "then show me" — follows only where the first is yes, *"because a company that has said it holds the record has no basis for withholding it from the person it is about."*

## 2. The entry format — no verdict field anywhere

| Field | Note |
|---|---|
| Company | As named on the contract |
| Date asked | |
| Exactly what was asked | Quoting the published template, **by version** |
| Date replied, or no reply as at a date | **Silence is a row, not a blank** |
| What was said | **Verbatim, requester's details removed** |
| Nothing else | **No score, no label, no adverb** |

The legal footing, checked in the source: serious-financial-loss threshold for trading bodies; substantial truth a complete defence; honest opinion only where the basis is published beside it. *"The record is that basis"* — and the design avoids the invitation rather than relying on winning, because *"the deterrent in practice is the cost of defending rather than the likelihood of losing."*

## 3. The three answers — three different things

| Answer | What it is | Recorded |
|---|---|---|
| We hold it, here it is | The best case | With the response time |
| We hold it and will not give it | A compliance question about a right the person has | Verbatim, with the reason given |
| **We do not hold it** | **A legitimate design choice** (data minimisation) | **Neutrally, no penalty** |

And the third row's sting, which is the register's strongest instrument and its fairest: **the inconsistency test.** *"A company that holds no usage record cannot simultaneously be personalising your experience, recommending content based on what you watched, optimising engagement, or reporting engagement metrics to investors… The test is not that they refused. It is that the answer to a data subject and the claims in the marketing cannot both be true."* Factual, checkable by anybody, lands only where true — *"a company that genuinely holds nothing and claims nothing passes cleanly."*

## 4. The reflexivity defences — designed in, not discovered

A register that publishes refusals teaches legal teams to refuse. Three mitigations, in order of leverage:

1. **A published policy page counts as an answer** — answering becomes a one-time cost, *"the only version a large company will actually do."*
2. **The good path published as loudly as the bad** — *"answered in full, in nine days, in machine-readable format"* as prominent as any refusal; *"a site that only names other people's gaps is not read as research."*
3. **Never publish a first refusal** — ask twice, stated interval, so *"every published refusal is a considered one."*

## 5. Governance — the criticisms, pre-empted by publishing the rules

The source names the criticism that arrives first: *"a founder-led list is a founder's grievances until the selection rule is published."* So the register publishes, before entry one: the **selection rule** for who gets asked · the **interval** defining a refusal · the **template versions** · the **review process** for the first entry (a solicitor, before, not after) · and the **transition intent** — the register data lives in a vault, so the move to a neutral domain or non-profit is a re-point, not a migration.

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This document is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0).