Terms of Service

1. Who you are contracting with

YASAD Connect is operated by Yazılım Sanayicileri Derneği (YASAD), the Turkish software industry association, of [YASAD postal address], Türkiye. Its public site is yasad.org.tr.

The application is designed, built and hosted for YASAD by Internative (internative.net) on a voluntary basis and at no charge to the association. Internative also holds a seat on YASAD's audit board (denetim kurulu). We state that openly rather than leave it to be discovered: the same organisation supplies the technology and sits on the body that audits the association. The iOS listing is published through an Apple Developer account belonging to Internative Yazılım A.Ş., which is why that company name appears in the App Store although the service is YASAD's.

In this document, "YASAD" and "we" mean the association; "you" means the person using the application.

2. What YASAD Connect is

YASAD Connect is a private business-matchmaking and professional-networking service for the members of matchmaking groups that YASAD runs. Its purpose is deliberately narrow: to help the right people inside a group find each other, connect, exchange messages and arrange meetings.

It is not an event agenda, not a marketplace, not a payment service and not a public social network. Nobody outside your groups can browse you, and there is no public profile page for anyone to find or a search engine to index.

There is one exception, and you are the only person who can create it. You may mint a share link to your own card — or to the card of a company you belong to — hand it to somebody who has no account here, and show it as a QR code. It lasts 24 hours, its address is unguessable and published nowhere, and what it opens is a deliberately reduced card: a name, a title, a company name and a photograph (for a company: its name, logo, sector, city, country and website). Your biography, your interests, the topics you are open to, the groups you belong to, your telephone numbers and your email address are not on it. No other member can make one about you, and a company's link can only be minted by its own people.

3. Who may use it

Anyone can open an account by verifying an email address; seeing anybody through it is by invitation only.

• YASAD imports a roster of invited email addresses for each matchmaking group, and may add an existing account to a group directly. An account whose address is on no roster and has been added to no group sees no members, companies, messages or meetings, and is seen by nobody. The app says so when such an account is opened.
• You must be at least 18 years old and using the service in a professional capacity.
• Accounts are personal. Do not share yours, and do not sign in on behalf of somebody else.

4. Your account and how you sign in

There is no password anywhere in this product. You enter an email address, we send a six-digit one-time code to it, and entering that code signs you in.

That makes your mailbox the key to your account. Keep it secure, and write to connect@yasad.org.tr if you believe someone else has read a code meant for you.

You may attach more than one email address to one account — a work address and a personal one, for instance. An address belongs to exactly one account: if the address you add is already attached to another account we will refuse and tell you, rather than merge the two silently. Verifying an address also joins your account to any group whose roster contains it.

5. What you see, and what other members see of you

Everything in the application is scoped to the matchmaking groups you belong to. You see the people, companies, conversations and meetings inside your groups and nothing outside them. That rule is enforced on our servers, not merely hidden in the interface.

Inside your groups, other members can see your name, title, biography, LinkedIn address, photo, interests, topics, primary company, the groups you share with them, the tag the association gave you in each of those groups (investor, attendee, exhibitor, for instance), and whether you are connected. Only the association gives or changes a tag, and a tag you carry in one group is not shown to members of a group you do not share. Your email address and your telephone numbers are shown on no screen in this product, to anybody.

There is exactly one route by which they can reach another member, and it is closed until you open it. A member you are connected to can export your card to their own address book — see section 8 — and that export carries your telephone numbers and your primary email address only if you have turned on "share my contact details with my connections" in your privacy settings. That switch is off by default, both conditions are checked on our servers, and neither being in the same group nor holding the link is enough on its own.

6. What you publish

Beyond the details the roster supplies, you decide what goes into your profile. Keep it accurate and keep it professional: do not claim a company, a role or a credential that is not yours.

By adding content to your profile you allow YASAD to store it and display it to other members of your groups, for that purpose and no other. It remains yours.

One technical point deserves your attention before you upload an image. Profile photos and company logos are stored as files with long, unguessable web addresses, and anyone holding such an address can open the image without signing in. The address is never published or listed, but the image bytes themselves are not group-scoped. Do not upload a picture you would mind being seen outside your groups.

7. How to behave here

Members come here to do business with each other, and that works only while the room stays clean.

• Do not send unsolicited bulk commercial messages, and do not treat the directory as a lead list.
• Do not collect, scrape, copy or export other members' details for any purpose outside the service.
• Do not automate access, reverse-engineer the application, or probe or interfere with its security.
• Do not post unlawful, misleading, defamatory or infringing material, and do not harass anyone.
• Do not misrepresent who you are or who you work for.

If you break these rules, YASAD may remove your content, suspend your access, or remove you from a group.

You have two tools of your own, and they work differently.

Blocking is yours alone and takes effect immediately: each of you disappears from the other's screens, any accepted meeting still ahead of you is cancelled and its reminders stop, and only you can lift it. The person you block is not told. No notification goes out, no screen says they have been blocked, and if somebody blocks you the application does not tell you either. Both directions can exist at once, and neither of you can undo the other's.

Reporting brings YASAD in. You pick a reason and write, in your own words, what happened. What reaches the association is that: your account of it, not a copy of the conversation. The system attaches no messages — section 8's rule that no administrative screen shows member-to-member content is not suspended because a report was filed — so if an operator needs more, they ask you. A report also freezes what the other party's profile said at the moment you filed, so that editing a title afterwards does not rewrite the record.

A person at the association reads it and closes it one of three ways: no action, a warning, or a suspension. No action is a real outcome and often the right one. You are told your report was decided; you are not shown the operator's note on it, and the person you reported is never told who reported them. Reporting in bad faith is itself a breach of this section.

8. Messages and meetings

Messages are private between their participants, but they are not end-to-end encrypted. They are stored on our server in a form our administrators could technically read, even though no screen in the administration panel displays message content. There is at present no way to delete a message once it is sent — not for you, and not for us through the product.

Please treat messaging as suitable for arranging business, and not as a channel for confidential, regulated or otherwise sensitive information.

Meetings you arrange are between you and the other participants. YASAD supplies the entry and the reminder, not the meeting.

Once a meeting is accepted you can put it in your own calendar, and there are two ways to do it.

With calendar permission. If you allow it, the application writes the meeting straight into your device's calendar and updates that entry if the meeting is later moved. Your operating system asks you for the permission; once given, the application reads your device's calendar entries so it can find what it wrote before and not add the same meeting twice, and writes the entry itself. Nothing it reads leaves your device. That access happens entirely on the phone: no data from your calendar is sent to our server, and YASAD does not know which calendars you keep, what is in them, or even whether you exported anything. You can withdraw the permission in your operating system's settings at any time; withdrawing it does not delete entries already written — those are yours now.

Without it: the calendar link. The older route is still here for anyone who would rather not grant the permission. It mints a web address that works for ten minutes and asks nobody to sign in — your browser opens it, and anyone holding that address in those ten minutes sees what it carries. What it carries is the start and end time, the place if one was given, and the other participant's name. The private note does not travel, and no email address does. Two consequences are worth knowing before you use it: the address opens in your browser, so it may sit in a browser history that syncs between your devices; and once you save the entry, the calendar service you saved it to is yours, not ours.

You can also put another member of your groups into your address book. The application mints a ten-minute, unguessable address that serves their card as a contact file your operating system can read; it asks for no permission over your contacts and never sees what is in them. That file always carries the name, title, company, LinkedIn address and photo address. It carries telephone numbers and an email address only when that member has turned the sharing switch on AND the two of you are connected — both checked on our servers when the link is minted and again when the file is fetched. Once a card is in your address book it is out of this product's hands: a correction, a change of settings or a block here will not reach back and change what you saved.

9. Introductions are suggestions, not endorsements

The application ranks people and companies you might want to meet. A suggestion is our best guess from the profile data available and nothing more. It is not advice, not a recommendation, and not a statement that the other party is solvent, competent or suitable.

YASAD does not verify what members write about themselves and is not a party to any deal you strike. Do your own diligence before you commit to anything.

10. Availability

The service is provided free of charge and maintained voluntarily. We intend to keep it running and current, but we promise no level of availability, and we may change, suspend or withdraw a feature — or the whole service — giving reasonable notice where that is practicable.

11. Ending your use

You may stop using the service whenever you wish, and you may delete your account from inside the application. Nobody has to be written to for that.

Deleting is scheduled rather than immediate, and the delay is the feature. Your request sets a date thirty days out. You may add a reason if you want to — it is optional, nothing in the product branches on it, and the association reads it because "why did people leave" is a question it cannot answer any other way.

For those thirty days, three things are true at once.

You disappear from every member-facing screen: the people and company directories, search, pickers, conversations and meeting lists. It is the same rule that already hides somebody you share no group with, applied in the same place — on our servers, not in the interface.

Nothing is destroyed. Not your profile, not your messages, not your connections or meetings.

And you can still sign in — but that session can do exactly two things: tell you the date, and cancel. Everything else is refused. A window you cannot reach would not be a window, and the alternative is the 2 a.m. email to the association that the thirty days exist to prevent.

Cancel and it is all back, because none of it ever went anywhere; the only thing that changes is the request's own status, and the cancelled request stays on the record rather than being tidied away.

At the end of the thirty days the deletion completes, and it cannot be undone. You can no longer sign in. Your profile, your privacy and notification preferences, the email addresses on your account and your group memberships are removed from the platform. Coming back means being invited again.

Some things outlive the deletion and you are entitled to know which ones before you start it. Messages you already delivered stay in the other person's conversation — they are that member's record as much as yours, and removing them one-sidedly would take something from somebody who did not ask for it. Your acceptances of these texts are kept, because they are the proof of what you agreed to and when. Records needed to establish, exercise or defend a legal claim, and records the law requires the association to keep, stay. And the deletion request itself — when you asked, the date it was set for, and what became of it — is kept, because that record is the only way the association can show a deletion was asked for and honoured.

There is still no self-service export. If you want a copy of your data, write to connect@yasad.org.tr and a person will handle it.

YASAD may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, that is no longer on any group roster, or if the association ends the matchmaking programme.

A suspension does not close silently. Your sessions end on every device at once, and the next time you try to sign in the screen tells you the account is suspended and shows you the reason the operator wrote — a door that shuts without saying why leaves you with nothing to answer. Nothing is deleted: your profile, messages, connections and meetings stay where they are, and lifting the suspension returns you to the same account with the reason cleared. Write to connect@yasad.org.tr if you want to contest one.

12. Intellectual property

The application, its name, its design and its software belong to YASAD and to Internative, and nothing in these terms transfers them to you. What you write and upload remains yours.

13. Liability

The service is provided as it is. To the extent the law allows, YASAD is not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for lost profit or lost business opportunity, or for anything arising out of a dealing between you and another member.

Nothing in this section limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited.

14. App stores

If you installed the application from the App Store or from Google Play, that store's own terms also govern the download and your device. Apple and Google are not parties to this agreement and are not responsible for the service.

15. Changes to these terms

Every version of this document is kept, numbered and dated. When we publish a materially new version you will be asked to read and accept it the next time you open the application, and we record which version you accepted and when.

16. Law and jurisdiction

These terms are governed by Turkish law, and the courts and enforcement offices at YASAD's registered seat in Türkiye have jurisdiction. If you use the service from another country, any protection given to you by the mandatory law of your own country, which cannot be contracted away, is unaffected.

17. Contact

Write to connect@yasad.org.tr, or to Yazılım Sanayicileri Derneği, [YASAD postal address], Türkiye.