Privacy Policy

Last updated 8 August 2026

chat4me provides an AI chat assistant that businesses add to their own websites. This policy explains what we collect, why, and how long we keep it. It covers both visitors who use the assistant and the businesses who hire us.

Who we are and who to contact

chat4me is a sole proprietorship registered in Ontario, Canada.

One person is accountable for privacy at chat4me, and handles all questions, access requests and complaints: daniel@chat4me.ca

What the assistant collects

When someone uses the chat assistant on a client's website, we record:

the text of the question asked
the time it was asked
which client's website it was asked on
whether our search found an answer
a session identifier stored in the visitor's browser for the length of that browsing session

We do not collect names, accounts or contact details, we do not store IP addresses, and we do not use tracking cookies or advertising identifiers of any kind.

To protect the service from abuse, our server may briefly check a visitor's IP address while handling a request, in order to limit how many messages can be sent in a short period. This check happens in memory only. The address is never written to disk, never stored alongside a question, and is discarded within about an hour.

How questions are handled, in order

We want to be precise about this, because the order matters:

First, the question is sent to our AI provider exactly as the visitor typed it. The assistant needs the complete message in order to understand and answer it, so nothing is removed at this stage.
Then, before the question is written to our own records, we automatically remove email addresses and phone numbers from it and replace them with a placeholder.

This means our stored copy of a conversation does not contain contact details — but if a visitor typed an email address or phone number into the chat, that information did reach our AI provider in its original form. The next section explains who that provider is and where they operate.

The assistant never asks for payment details, health information or identification numbers, and is instructed to tell anyone who types them to contact the business directly instead. We ask visitors not to enter personal information they would not want handled this way.

Why we collect it

Two reasons only:

To show the business which questions their customers are asking, and which questions the assistant could not answer.
To count usage against the plan limits on their account.

We do not sell this information, share it for advertising, or use it to build profiles of individual visitors.

Where the information goes

To generate an answer, the question as typed and relevant content from the client's own website are sent to Anthropic, our AI provider, whose servers are located in the United States. Information processed in the United States may be accessible to US authorities under the laws of that country.

Anthropic processes this information to generate a response and does not use it to train their models. They retain a copy for a limited period in order to monitor for misuse of their service, after which it is deleted. We have no ability to retrieve or search anything held by Anthropic.

Apart from Anthropic, we do not disclose visitor questions to any third party, except where required by law.

Where it is stored and for how long

Records are stored on a server located in a Toronto, Canada data centre operated by our hosting provider. Only chat4me has access to the data on that server.

Questions are automatically deleted after 90 days. A scheduled job runs daily and removes anything older.

Content we collect from a client's website to answer questions is deleted when that client's service ends.

How we protect it

All traffic between a visitor's browser, the client's website and our server is encrypted in transit. Access to the server is restricted to the owner of chat4me using key-based authentication.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach occurs that creates a real risk of significant harm, we will notify the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and affected individuals as the law requires.

Your rights

Anyone may ask us what we hold, ask for a correction, or ask us to delete it. Write to daniel@chat4me.ca and we will respond within 30 days, at no cost.

Because we do not store names or contact details alongside questions, we may not be able to identify which records are yours. If you can tell us the website and roughly when you used the chat, we will do our best.

Complaints

If you think we have mishandled your information, write to daniel@chat4me.ca. We will acknowledge your complaint, investigate it, and tell you the outcome and what we have changed, within 30 days.

If you are not satisfied with our response, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada at priv.gc.ca.

Businesses who use chat4me

If you are a client, we hold your business name, contact details, website address, and the content we collect from your site in order to answer questions. We process visitor questions on your behalf and only to provide the service. We delete your data on request, and when your service ends.

Because visitor questions are processed outside Canada as described above, your own privacy policy should tell your customers that messages they send through the chat assistant are handled by a service provider in the United States. We can supply wording for this on request.

Changes

If this policy changes we will update the date at the top. Material changes affecting existing clients will be sent by email.