Privacy
What we do with data, in the same plain English as the rest of the site. If anything here is unclear, ask us and we will fix the wording.
Last updated 13 November 2026.
Who we are
ChatRelay is a product of SDAN LTD, a studio registered in England and Wales. SDAN LTD is the data controller for anything on this website, and the data processor for your customers' messages. You can reach us at hello@chatrelay.co.uk, and we answer.
SDAN LTD is registered in England and Wales, company number 17147199, at 128 City Road, London, EC1V 2NX. We are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office under reference ZC214549.
The bit that matters most: who is responsible for what
There are two different sets of data here and they work differently.
Messages from your customers
When somebody gets in touch through any of the ways in you have switched on, whether that is the chat box on your website, your contact form, or an email, Facebook or Instagram account you have connected, you decide why that message is collected and what happens to it. In data protection terms you are the controller and we are your processor. We handle those messages on your instructions, which are the settings you choose in your account, under our data processing agreement.
That means it is your job, not ours, to tell your own customers that you use us. Most people do this with a line in their own privacy notice.
Your own account
For your name, your email address, your website address and your billing details, we are the controller. That part is covered below under "Your account".
What the chat box collects
Whatever the person types, plus anything they volunteer, such as their name, an email address or a phone number, so you know who you are talking to and can reply when you are not at your desk, plus which page of your site they were on when they wrote to you. Nothing else. In particular:
- The chat box sets no cookies. Before anyone opens it, the only thing that can be stored is a note that they closed the little prompt, so it does not keep popping up while they are on your site. That goes when they close the tab.
- When somebody does open it, we save one random reference on their device so their conversation follows them from page to page instead of starting again each time. It says nothing about who they are, it is only ever used to continue the chat they started, and it deletes itself a day later. We enforce that on the device as well as on our own side, so the two cannot drift apart. That is what the rules call strictly necessary, so your cookie banner does not need to change because of us.
- Once a page loads, the chat box quietly tells us it loaded, so we can warn you if it ever stops working. That message says which website it came from and nothing whatsoever about the person visiting it.
- We do not track people around your website or anywhere else.
- We do not build advertising profiles and we do not sell anything to anybody.
How long things are kept
You choose: 30 days, 90 days or a year. Whichever you pick, conversations delete themselves when the time is up. They are not archived somewhere else.
If you send a customer a calendar invite, the time, and what and where if you add them, are kept with that conversation and delete themselves with it. The link that puts it in their calendar stops working at the same moment. If you ask our app to put a copy in your own calendar too, it does that on your phone, with permission to add events and nothing more: it cannot read anything already in your calendar.
The latest summary and suggested reply written for you are kept with that conversation, so our app can show them, and delete themselves with it.
If somebody wrote in on Facebook or Instagram, Meta tells us the name they show there, and on Instagram their username, so you can see who you are answering, as you would in Facebook or Instagram themselves. Nothing else from their profile is asked for. Meta also tells us when your replies reach them and when they read them, so you can see that your answer arrived. The name is kept with that conversation, as is only the latest time for each of those, and they delete themselves with it.
If you turn on Know your customers, we match a returning person to an earlier conversation using the email address or phone number they gave in the chat box or your contact form, or the address they emailed you from. It can only look back as far as your retention setting, and it uses nothing else. No cookies, no device fingerprints, no tracking.
Erasure requests. If one of your customers asks you to delete their details, that is a request you have to act on rather than wait out. Send /forget with their email address or phone number where your enquiries arrive and our copy is cleared straight away, or tell us and we will do it without undue delay, normally the same working day. The copy sitting in your own Telegram, Slack or inbox is yours to delete, because we cannot reach into your accounts.
If you wrote to a business and want your messages deleted
Whether you used Facebook, Instagram, a business's website, or ChatRelay's own demo, you can ask the business, or email us at hello@chatrelay.co.uk with the name of the business and roughly when you wrote. If you wrote to ChatRelay itself or to our demo, we delete it ourselves without undue delay, normally the same working day, and tell you when it is done. If you wrote to one of our customers, the messages are theirs, so we pass your request to them the same working day and tell you we have. Even if nobody asks, conversations delete themselves after the periods set out on this page. Messages sent on Facebook or Instagram also stay in those apps, where you can delete them yourself.
Who else sees the messages
The whole point of ChatRelay is that your messages go somewhere you already are, so by choosing a destination you are choosing who else handles them.
| Who | Why |
|---|---|
| The apps you pick | Wherever you have chosen to receive enquiries: Telegram, Slack, Discord, Google Chat, Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp, your email provider, our own app on your phone, or your own webhook. Each has its own privacy terms and its own servers, and we have no control over any of them. That is the trade you are making by choosing one, and it is why you get to choose. |
| Meta | Only where you have turned one of theirs on. WhatsApp carries enquiries out to you; your Facebook page and your Instagram carry them in. Meta handles those messages under its own terms, on its own servers, and the rules can change without asking us. |
| Microsoft | Only if your enquiries go to Microsoft Teams through the ChatRelay app in Teams. Microsoft's Azure Bot Service carries each enquiry to your channel, and your team's answers back to us, under Microsoft's own terms. Whoever answers is named as Teams shows them, beside their answer on the card in your channel and in our record of that conversation, which is deleted with it. For the people who can change your ChatRelay settings from Teams, we keep the name Teams shows and a scrambled form of their Teams id, until they are taken off or your account closes. The app cannot read your channel: it only sees an answer typed into its own card, and a message that mentions it by name. If somebody presses Report on a card to tell us about something AI wrote, we are told which account it was on, when, and a reference, and nothing anybody wrote or who pressed it. Our note that it was reported is deleted with that conversation. |
| Vercel | Runs the service. Our functions are pinned to their London region. |
| Upstash | Stores conversations until they expire, and holds the timers that chase an unanswered enquiry. Both databases are in the European Union. The timers carry a reference number and nothing anybody wrote. |
| Resend | Sends every email we send: an enquiry forwarded to your inbox, the reply we pass on to a customer who was here overnight, and our own emails to you. They handle the contents of those. |
| Cloudflare | Protects our website and app, and you, from attacks. Everything sent to us passes through their network first, including messages from Facebook and Instagram. They also receive every email sent to chatrelay.co.uk and pass it on, including email replies to enquiries and anything sent to hello@. |
| Zoho | Holds our hello@chatrelay.co.uk mailbox, including anything you email us there. |
| Apple | Delivers notifications to the ChatRelay app. They are given a code for your phone and a notice with none of your customer's words in it. If you answer by Siri, what you say is handled by Apple as any dictation is. If you sign in with Apple, Apple confirms it is you. |
| Google, Mozilla and Apple | Deliver notifications to the ChatRelay app in your browser, at chatrelay.co.uk/app, if you allow them. Each notification is encrypted for your browser, so the company carrying it cannot read it. |
| Stripe | Takes the payment. They see your billing details. We never do: your card number does not touch our servers. |
| Supabase | Holds our own running record of the service, so that we hear when something goes wrong: an account signing up, paying or leaving, an enquiry arriving or going unanswered, a delivery that keeps failing. Each line names your business by its name or website and nothing else. Never a message, never your customer, never anything anybody wrote. In London, and each line is deleted after 30 days. |
| Companies House | Only if you turn on "Know your customers". We search the public register for the company behind a work email domain. They receive a name worked out from the domain, never the address itself, never your customer's name, and never anything written in a message. A personal address such as one ending gmail.com is recognised without asking anybody: it never leaves our servers at all. |
| Anthropic | Writes the one line summary on a long conversation, and the suggested reply that comes underneath an enquiry. They are sent the recent messages in that conversation, with email addresses, phone numbers and the name the customer gave us replaced by placeholders, plus your saved answers, and nothing about any other conversation. What comes back goes to you and never to your customer, unless you let your assistant answer. Then, on your website chat only, it also picks which of your own saved answers fits a customer's question, and that answer is sent to them word for word, labelled to your customer as automatic. If you ask for an interview, it suggests questions your customers might ask, and for that it is sent your business's name, your website and the questions you have already answered, and nothing your customers wrote. Otherwise it is a draft in your own message app, or in our app, that you send, change, or ignore, and nothing is ever sent on its own. Their commercial terms say they do not train models on what is sent through it. If you would rather this did not happen at all, send /drafts off wherever you receive your enquiries and your customers' messages will not be sent to them. |
We will tell you before we add anyone to that list.
Where data is held
Your customers' messages are stored in the European Union and handled by functions pinned to London. On the way to us they pass through Cloudflare's worldwide network, under the safeguards below.
Most of the companies above are American. Where one of them handles personal data outside the UK or the EU, it does so under a safeguard UK law accepts: the UK addendum to the standard contractual clauses, which is part of that company's own data terms with us, or the UK's data bridge with the United States for the companies certified to it. Ask us and we will tell you which applies to which. Stripe sees your billing details and never your customers' messages. Anthropic can be switched off without leaving: /drafts off.
Note that if you send messages to WhatsApp, Messenger or Instagram, Meta processes them under their own terms and that involves transfers outside the UK. Choosing Telegram, Slack or a webhook does the same in each of their own ways. This is unavoidable in a product whose job is to deliver messages to those places, which is why you get to pick.
This website
Five things happen on chatrelay.co.uk that are worth naming.
- A screenshot service. If you type your web address into the demo, our server asks Microlink for a picture of that site. They are told the address. They are not told your IP address, and they never hear from your browser at all: the picture reaches you from us. We hold the picture for a day so the next person asking about the same site does not cost another fetch.
- We keep the address you typed. Just the domain, such as example.co.uk, so we know which kinds of business are interested. We do not store your IP address against it and we do not try to work out who you are. It is deleted after 90 days.
- We count visits to these marketing pages. Vercel Web Analytics, on this page and the handful like it. It records that a page was viewed, roughly where from and on what sort of device. It sets no cookie, it does not follow you to other websites, and the script is served from chatrelay.co.uk rather than from anybody else, so no advertising or analytics company learns you were here. It is not on the chat box. The widget that runs on your website is deliberately excluded, because measuring it would mean measuring your visitors on your site, and that is the thing this product exists not to do.
- Our own chat box. The same one our customers put on their websites, and we answer it ourselves. It works exactly as it does on theirs: no cookies, and only once you open it, one random reference on your device so the conversation follows you from page to page. What you write comes to us at SDAN like an enquiry to any business, and is deleted on the same schedule. The one exception is the live demo: if you send nothing but the code of somebody's demo that is running, that chat is tied to their demo for the rest of its hour, and what you write after it goes to them instead of to us, as it would on our Facebook page. The code itself is not kept, and when the demo ends you are told, and are writing to us again. More on the demo below. If you would rather not use it, hello@chatrelay.co.uk reaches the same people.
- A one-off note in your browser. We store a single flag called
cr-openerso the opening animation does not replay every time you visit. It is not a cookie, it never leaves your device, and it is gone when you close the tab.
Nothing on this site loads from anywhere but us, including the visit counting above. The typefaces are served from our own domain rather than from Google, so visiting a page here does not tell Google you were here. There is no tag manager, no embedded video from another site and no advertising pixel. If you open your browser's network tab on any page of chatrelay.co.uk, every single request goes to chatrelay.co.uk.
Your account
We keep your name, your email address, the websites you use us on, where your enquiries go, your settings, your saved answers, the devices you have signed in and your billing records. We use them to run the service, take payment and email you about the service. Billing records are kept for six years because HMRC requires it. Everything else is deleted within 30 days of you closing your account, and from any backup within three days after that.
We send you service emails, such as a receipt or a warning that something has stopped working. We will not add you to a marketing list unless you ask, by ticking one of two boxes when you sign up or try the demo: one for ChatRelay news and offers, and one for news and offers on SDAN's other products, like TradeBooked. Both start unticked and nothing else depends on them. On our page for teams you can also ask for one email when ChatRelay works in Microsoft Teams. For that we keep your address, and your company name and how many people answer enquiries if you gave them, and we send that one email and nothing else. We keep what you ticked, the words beside it and when, as proof that you asked. A tick on the sign up form, or a request on the teams page, only counts once you confirm it from the email we send you, so nobody can put your address on our list but you.
Every one of those emails has a link to a page where you can keep them coming, pause them for one, three or six months, or unsubscribe, in one tap and without signing in. If you unsubscribe, we keep only a scrambled fingerprint of your address, so it is never added again without a fresh tick. If you tell us why you left, that is kept without your address.
If you try the live demo
The app's live demo is a real account for one hour. For that hour we are the controller of what is in it, because the messages are sent to us: to our Facebook page, our Instagram, a demo email address of ours, or the chat box on this website.
- What we keep. Your email address, to send the code that proves it is yours. The code you pick, and the business name if you give one. The messages sent to the demo and the answers sent from it. For somebody writing in on Facebook or Instagram, the name those sites show for them, and a scrambled fingerprint of the id they give them, and for somebody using the chat box on this website, a scrambled fingerprint of their conversation with us. Those are kept until a day after the demo ends, so that anybody still writing to it can be told it has finished. Nothing else, and nothing in a demo is sent to Anthropic or Companies House.
- For how long. One hour. At the end, or when you end it sooner, the account and everything in it is deleted. A scrambled fingerprint of your email address is kept for a day, so that one address cannot start more than three demos a day.
- What we cannot delete. Messages sent on Facebook or Instagram also sit in those apps, including in our own page's inbox there, like any message to a page. Emails sit in the inboxes they were sent from and to.
- Answers come from whoever is running the demo, sent in our name. So a demo cannot send links, abusive language, slurs, threats or sexual content, and it only ever emails the address that started it.
- If a demo is misused. A conversation flagged for one of those things is kept longer instead of for an hour: 7 days for a link or abusive language, and 90 days for a slur, a threat, sexual content, or anything the person running the demo reports to us. Whoever did it is blocked from demos for a year, by a scrambled fingerprint of their email address, their Facebook or Instagram id, or their conversation in the chat box on this website. We keep these to keep the service safe and to deal with complaints, which is a legitimate interest under UK GDPR. Nobody reads them unless the police or a court ask us to, and then we keep them for as long as that takes.
What we use it for, and why we are allowed to
Where we are the controller, this is everything we use personal data for, the reason the law lets us, and how long we keep it. Your customers' messages are not on this list: for those you are the controller and we are your processor, under the data processing agreement.
| What for | Why we are allowed to | How long |
|---|---|---|
| Running your account, and service emails such as receipts and warnings | Contract: it is the service you signed up for. If your company signed up rather than you, legitimate interests: running the service it pays for. | Until 30 days after you close your account |
| Billing records | Legal obligation: HMRC requires them | Six years |
| ChatRelay news and offers, and news on our other products | Consent: a box you ticked | Until you unsubscribe |
| The one email when ChatRelay works in Microsoft Teams | Consent: you asked for it on our page for teams | Until that email is sent, or you tell us not to send it |
| Not emailing you again once you have unsubscribed | Legitimate interests: keeping to your choice | A scrambled fingerprint of your address, for good |
| Counting visits to these pages | Legitimate interests: knowing which pages people read | Vercel throws away what tells one visitor from another after a day |
| Our running record of the service, in Supabase | Legitimate interests: hearing when something goes wrong, so we can fix it | 30 days |
| The live demo | Legitimate interests: letting you try ChatRelay with real messages, as you asked | An hour, and a few things a day (above) |
| Records of a misused demo, and blocks | Legitimate interests: keeping the service safe and dealing with complaints | 7 or 90 days. Blocks a year |
| The picture of your site in the demo on our home page, and the domain you typed | Legitimate interests: showing you what you asked to see, and learning which kinds of business are interested | The picture a day, the domain 90 days |
| Answering you when you write to us, through our chat box, our Facebook page or Instagram, or hello@ | Legitimate interests: replying to you. If you are a customer, contract. | Chat box, Facebook and Instagram: like any enquiry, on the time limit set on our own account. Email: as long as we need it to deal with what you asked |
Backups. We keep no backups of conversations. When we back up the database that holds accounts and settings, each backup deletes itself within three days. So anything deleted from it, including your account 30 days after you close it, is gone from any backup within three days as well. If we ever have to restore a backup after a fault, we delete again whatever had been deleted since.
Your rights
You can ask us for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, or object to what we are doing with it. Email hello@chatrelay.co.uk and we will answer within one month.
If you are not happy with how we have handled it, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113. We would rather you told us first so we can put it right.
Security
Messages are encrypted in transit. Access to the production systems is limited to the people who need it. If there is ever a breach that puts anyone at risk, we will tell the ICO within 72 hours and we will tell you.
If you use ChatRelay with a team
On the Team plan you can choose to show your customers the first name of whoever answered them, and to count how many enquiries each person answers and how quickly. Both are off until you turn them on, and nothing is counted while they are off. The names come from your own systems: the name your organisation gives a person in Microsoft Teams, or the name you gave a person in ChatRelay. Counts by person are kept for thirteen months, and /team forget and a person's name removes their name and their counts from everything we hold.
Your staff should know. Here is a note you can give them, as it is or in your own words:
We use ChatRelay to answer enquiries from our website. When you answer one, the customer may see your first name beside the reply. We may also see how many enquiries you answer and how quickly, to plan cover and spot when we need more help. ChatRelay keeps your name with the conversation until it is deleted, and the counts for thirteen months, and removes both when we ask. It cannot read anything else in our Teams, Slack or Discord.
Changes
If we change this, we will change the date at the top. If the change matters, we will email you about it rather than hoping you notice.