Delete my data

Start here: whose data is it?

Talkfront is chat software that other companies put on their websites. That means there are two quite different situations, and only one of them is ours to act on.

You chatted with a company that uses Talkfront

This covers almost everyone who reaches this page. If you used a chat window on a shop's website, that shop is the controller of the conversation and we are theirprocessor. We hold the data on their behalf and under their instructions, so we are not allowed to delete it because you asked us to.

Ask the company you were chatting with. Any Talkfront customer can erase everything about one person from their own account, on every plan, in a single action. It is not a feature they have to buy or a ticket they have to raise with us.

If you cannot reach them, or they do not respond, email privacy@talkfront.app and we will pass your request to them and follow it up. Tell us which website you were on, because that is how we find the right customer.

You have a Talkfront account

Then we are the controller and this is ours to do. You do not need to ask: an owner can delete a workspace from Settings → Danger zone in the app, which removes the workspace and everything in it, including every website, contact, conversation and uploaded file. It is immediate and it cannot be undone.

If you would rather we did it, or you have lost access to the account, email privacy@talkfront.app from the address the account is registered to.

You only visited this website

There is almost nothing to delete. Nothing you do on talkfront.app is tied to your name, and what little is stored lives in your own browser, where clearing site data removes it. The cookie notice lists it.

Making the request

This opens a case on our support desk and gives you a reference. Only fill in what you are asked for: we may have to check you are the person whose data it is, and we will keep that to the minimum. We are not going to ask for photo identification to delete a chat about a delivery.

If you would rather write to us yourself, email privacy@talkfront.app with the same details.

What erasure actually removes

When a conversation is erased, so is all of this:

• The conversation and every message in it, on both sides.
• Any files sent during the chat. These are deleted from the storage they sit in, not just unlinked from the record, because otherwise the file is still there.
• The contact record: name, email address, phone number, company, and anything the website passed to us about you.
• The visit history attached to you: the pages you were on, the approximate location worked out from your IP address, and the browser you used.
• The token stored in your browser that kept the conversation with you between pages.

There is no recycle bin. Deleted is deleted, and we cannot get it back for you afterwards, so be sure before you ask.

What survives it, and why

Being straight about the edges of this matters more than a clean promise:

• Backups. We take them so that a failure does not lose everyone's data, and they are overwritten on a rolling schedule. A copy of a deleted record can therefore sit in a backup for a period after the live record has gone. Backups are not searched or used for anything else, and if we ever had to restore from one we would re-apply deletions that had been made since.
• Billing records. If you had a paid account, invoices are business records we are required to keep for six years, and we cannot delete them on request. They contain the account and the amount, not conversations.
• The fact of the deletion. A workspace's transparency log records that data was erased, by whom and when. It does not keep what was erased.

How long it takes

Under UK GDPR we have one month, and we will usually be much faster than that. If a request is genuinely complicated we can extend by up to two further months, and if we do we will tell you why inside the first month rather than going quiet.

Where you are asking a company that uses Talkfront rather than us, the same clock applies to them, and it starts when you ask them.

When we might say no

The right to erasure is not unconditional. We may refuse, in whole or in part, where we still need the data to defend a legal claim, to meet a legal obligation such as the billing records above, or where a request is repeated to the point of being an end in itself. If we refuse we will say so plainly, say which part and why, and tell you how to challenge it.

If we get it wrong

Tell us first, at privacy@talkfront.app, and we will try to put it right. You can also complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk, and you do not have to come to us first to do that.

The full privacy notice covers everything else: what we collect, why, and the other rights you have besides this one.