Privacy notice for our WhatsApp customer service with AI assistance

1. What this covers

Omni Canvas Studio develops and operates software for customer service on WhatsApp. With this software, an AI assistant answers your messages, takes down your request and passes it to a person. This notice explains which data is processed. It supplements our privacy policy.

2. Who is responsible

When you write to Omni Canvas Studio on WhatsApp and our assistant replies, Omni Canvas Studio is the controller. Full controller details are in section 1 of our privacy policy and in the legal notice. Email: datenschutz@omnicanvas.de

When you write to another business that uses our software, that business is the controller and its privacy notice applies. Omni Canvas Studio then processes the data on that business's behalf. The following sections describe Omni Canvas Studio's own customer service.

3. What AI assistance means here

The assistant's replies are generated automatically by an AI language model and sent without prior review by a person. They can contain mistakes. The assistant answers questions about our services and asks for your name, a way to contact you and your request, so that a person from our team can get back to you. It makes no decision that has legal effects on you or similarly significantly affects you.

If you would rather talk to a person, say so in the chat at any time and the assistant will pass your request to our team. You can also reach us by email using the details in the legal notice.

When a person from our team has taken over your conversation, the replies you receive in it are written by that person, not by the assistant.

4. Data we process

• your WhatsApp phone number and technical message identifiers;
• the content of your text messages and when you send them;
• our replies to you, whether written by the assistant or by a person from our team, and when they were recorded;
• a record that our team took over, handed back or concluded your conversation, when this happened, how many times it was passed to our team, and the team account that did it;
• voice messages: we have them converted into text. We do not store the audio file; the recognised text is processed like a text message;
• information you give in the conversation, for example your name, contact details, company, request and preferred deadlines.

Authorised members of our team can read your whole conversation in our own customer-service application, which runs on the server named in section 6, and can reply to you from there.

We do not evaluate images, documents, locations or other message types; the assistant asks you to continue in text. We do not read your WhatsApp profile name. Please do not send health data, bank details, passwords or other sensitive information in the chat.

5. Purposes and legal bases

We process the data to answer your request and pass it to our team. For requests about our services this serves steps prior to entering into a contract (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR); otherwise we rely on Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR. Our legitimate interest is to answer requests quickly, also outside our working hours, and pass them to the right person. For secure operation, troubleshooting and abuse prevention (technical logs, usage limits) we also rely on Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR.

Using WhatsApp is voluntary. Without your information we cannot handle your request; you can email us instead. We do not use your data for advertising or to train AI models.

6. Service providers and recipients

• Meta (Meta Platforms Ireland Limited, WhatsApp Business Platform): transmits messages between you and us. Meta acts as a data processor and, according to Meta, stores messages for up to 30 days. Your own use of WhatsApp is governed by WhatsApp's privacy policy.
• Anthropic: generates the assistant's replies with the Claude AI model. It receives the conversation in text form and the information from the conversation, not your WhatsApp phone number unless you type it into the chat. According to Anthropic, this data is not used for training and is normally deleted within 30 days; content flagged for a possible breach of its usage policy may be kept for up to two years.
• Groq: converts voice messages into text. According to Groq, the data is not used for training; logs for troubleshooting and abuse prevention may be kept for up to 30 days.
• Hetzner Online GmbH: operates the server in Nuremberg, Germany, on which our software runs and the data is stored.
• Cloudflare, Inc.: forwards incoming messages to that server over an encrypted connection.
• Telegram: when your request goes to our team, we alert our team through a Telegram bot in our team's Telegram account. The alert contains your name, contact details, request and other information from the conversation, but not the whole conversation; our team reads the whole conversation in our own customer-service application (section 4), not in Telegram. Telegram is not our processor for this; it processes these messages under its own privacy policy.

Anthropic, Groq, Cloudflare and Meta may process data outside the EU, in particular in the USA. These transfers rely on the European Commission's standard contractual clauses in the providers' data processing terms. Telegram is established outside the EEA; there is no data processing agreement with Telegram.

7. Retention

• The stored conversation context the assistant uses is deleted automatically once there has been no activity in the conversation for 24 hours. While the service is running, the current conversation history may also be held in working memory until the service is restarted.
• Voice messages are not stored.
• Your messages and request details are deleted by the daily automatic clean-up once they are older than 90 days.
• The conversation record in our customer-service application (your messages, our replies, the text of voice messages and our internal notes on how the conversation is handled) is deleted once each entry is older than 90 days: by a clean-up that runs every hour while that application is switched on, and in any case by the daily clean-up.
• Records of when our team took over or handed back your conversation are deleted by the daily clean-up once they are more than 180 days old. The attendance record (that our team took over your conversation, how many times it was passed to our team and, once it is concluded, when and with which team account) is deleted by the daily clean-up 180 days after the conclusion or, if the attendance was never concluded, once the record has not changed for more than 180 days and no entry of the conversation record remains.
• Handoff data for our team is deleted by the daily clean-up once the handoff is more than 30 days old, and at the latest once it is older than 90 days.
• Your phone number and the technical link to your conversation are deleted by the daily clean-up once both your last message and the last action on your conversation by our team (for example a takeover, its end, or merging contacts) are more than 180 days old. While our team has taken over your conversation, the link is kept for as long as the takeover lasts.
• Technical logs are subject to a 30-day retention setting; older entries are removed when log files are rotated. They normally show phone numbers only in shortened form, but may contain technical message identifiers from which your phone number can be derived.
• In each Telegram chat where the seven-day auto-delete timer was enabled before a handoff message was sent, that message is deleted automatically seven days after it is sent; older messages and messages in other chats are deleted manually when we handle an erasure request.
• Before a software update, we may create a copy of the service database so that the update can be reversed. We delete such copies at the daily clean-up once they are older than seven days; until then, a copy may still contain data that the periods above or a deletion request would otherwise already have removed.

8. Your rights and how to request deletion

You have the right of access (Art. 15 GDPR), rectification (Art. 16), erasure (Art. 17), restriction of processing (Art. 18) and data portability (Art. 20). Where we rely on Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR, you may object on grounds relating to your particular situation (Art. 21).

To request deletion: email datenschutz@omnicanvas.de with the WhatsApp number you wrote from and, if applicable, the email address you gave in the chat. Within one month we delete the database records that can be matched exactly to that number or that email address, manually delete the related handoff messages in our team's Telegram chat, and confirm the result to you. Handoff data that contains neither your number nor that email address as contact details cannot be reliably attributed to you; it is deleted within the handoff retention period above. As part of the deletion, we then restart the service, which removes any conversation history still held in its working memory. Copies remaining with Meta, Anthropic and Groq are subject to the periods and exceptions described above; technical logs to the retention setting above.

You may also lodge a complaint with a data protection supervisory authority (Art. 77 GDPR), for example the State Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information of Baden-Württemberg.

9. Changes

We update this notice when the customer service changes, for example through new features or service providers.