Who owns your rate data, and can you export it today?

Nobody has ever said no to this question. That is the problem with it.

Ownership language is cheap. It sits near the top of almost every software contract, it is usually true, and on its own it settles nothing. Ownership tells you whose data it is. It does not tell you who else may use it, what may be built from it, how you get a copy, or what happens to the copies they hold.

Think about what is actually in there after a year. The buy rate your NVOCC gives you on a lane you have run for six years. The handling tariff your agent quotes you and not the forwarder two floors down. Which customers accept a longer transit for a lower price and which will not. What you charged that shipper in March, and what you lost the April enquiry by. None of that sits in one place in your TMS. After a year on a quoting product, all of it sits in one place in theirs.

There is a legal reason to care, and it is not about privacy. Under the European directive on trade secrets, information counts as a trade secret only when three things are true at once. It is not generally known. It has commercial value because it is secret. And it “has been subject to reasonable steps under the circumstances, by the person lawfully in control of the information, to keep it secret”. The third condition is the one you can lose by signing something. A contract that lets a supplier feed your rates into a shared model is not obviously a reasonable step to keep them secret.

So C1 is two questions inside one sentence. Who may use it decides your commercial position. Can you export it today decides whether you are free to leave. The second half gets answered least precisely.

Five of them, and they are almost never next to each other in the document.

Print the agreement and read these five. Twenty minutes, and you will know more than most buyers learn in three meetings.

The wording changes from company to company. The five decisions do not.

Here is why that clause behaves differently in freight than in most businesses. A benchmark built from many forwarders’ rates is a useful product. It is also a description of your buying power. On a busy trade there may be forty forwarders in the sample and nobody can pick you out of it. On a thin one there are four, and one of them is you.

Ask the plain version. The sheet gives you the wording: can you use my data to train anything that another forwarder benefits from? It is a yes or no question and it is fair to expect a yes or no answer.

One more thing sits under the same heading and is often confused with it. Your customer list contains people, and people bring data-protection rules with them. Under the European regulation, processing by a processor has to be governed by a contract that binds them to act on your instructions and to delete or return all the personal data after the end of the services, at the controller's choice. That covers the names and the email addresses in your list. It does not cover your rates. Those are protected by the contract you sign and by nothing else.

It is short, it points at a document, and it ends with you holding a file.

The sheet sets the standard: you own it, you export it yourself at any time, in a normal format, and they point at the clause that says so. That last part is the whole test. Anyone can say the first three.

• A clause number. Not a promise, a place in a document you can read after the meeting.
• A named format. A spreadsheet file with the lane, the date, the customer, the charge lines and the outcome in it.
• A self-service route. A button inside the product, not an email to their support desk.
• A straight no to the training question, or a straight yes with a boundary you can live with.
• A named group inside their company who can see your rates, and what stops everybody else.

A vendor who has been asked this before answers in four sentences and offers to send the clause. A vendor who has not offers reassurance instead.

It will all sound reasonable in the meeting. These four are why the answer can still be worth nothing.

Trap one. Ownership answered instead of access

“You own your data” is a true sentence that answers a question you did not ask. Push it back to the second half, in the sheet’s own words: today, without asking you, in a format my pricing exec can open.

Trap two. Anonymous on a busy lane, obvious on a thin one

Aggregated and anonymised sounds absolute and is not. Ask how many companies are in the smallest group they would publish or sell from, and what happens on a lane where the answer is three.

Trap three. The export that is really a support ticket

An export you must request is a different product from an export you can run. Ask who presses the button, how long it takes, whether it covers attachments, and whether it still works during a payment dispute.

Trap four. The terms that live on a web page

If the agreement points at a URL for its data terms, those terms can change without you. Ask what notice you get, whether you may object, and whether the version you signed is attached to the order form.

The European Data Act, in force since 11 January 2024 and applying from 12 September 2025, exists partly because of trap four. Its stated purpose includes protecting companies from “unjust contractual terms imposed by parties in stronger market positions”. Whether it reaches your supplier is a question for your lawyer. That it describes a real pattern is not.

Three columns, one line per vendor, written in the meeting. Nobody remembers a clause number a week later.

Then get it into the order form. A sales email saying you own your data is not a contract term, and the person who wrote it may not be there in a year. One line in the signed document is worth an afternoon of reassurance.

They do, and pretending otherwise would make this a worse article.

A product that prices from your history has to read your history. A product that drafts a reply on your customer’s thread has to read the thread. Holding your data is not the problem. Three different things get called by the same name and only one of them should worry you.

• Processing for you. Your data, used to do your work, returned or deleted when you go. This is the deal you are buying.
• Improving the product for you. Your own corrections and rules making your own results better. Normal, and still worth having in writing.
• Improving a shared model. Your rates making somebody else’s results better. This is the one to decide deliberately, and the one the dodge question on the sheet is aimed at.

One example of what a public boundary looks like. On this site FreighAI states, about carrier accounts: “You keep your own carrier accounts and negotiated rates. FreighAI never sits between you and your carrier relationship.” That is a statement about carrier relationships, not a contract term about data. Ask us for the clause in writing, exactly as you would ask anyone else, and judge it against the five clauses above.

Turn C1 on the software you already have. Most forwarders have never read the data clause in the contract they signed in 2019. If you cannot export your quote history from the product you have today, C1 is not really a question about the new supplier.