Privacy Policy

1. Introduction

ChatAxon team ("we," "us," or "our") respects the privacy of our users ("user" or "you"). This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, disclose, and safeguard your information when you visit our website ChatAxon and use our services, including our Instagram Direct Message automation feature. Please read this privacy policy carefully.

2. Information We Collect

We may collect information about you in a variety of ways. The information we may collect on the Site includes:

• Personal Data: Personally identifiable information, such as your name and email address, that you voluntarily give to us when you fill out forms (e.g., Early Access, Contact, or Custom Integration forms).
• Business Data: Information related to your business, such as your website URL, e-commerce platform name, order volume, and catalog size, provided during the inquiry process.
• Derivative Data: Information our servers automatically collect when you access the Site, such as your IP address, your browser type, your operating system, and your access times.
• Instagram Account Data (Merchant): When a merchant connects their Instagram Business account to ChatAxon, we receive from Meta Platforms, Inc.: the Instagram numeric user ID, the Instagram handle (@username), the connected Facebook Page ID, and a long-lived Page access token. Tokens are stored encrypted at rest using AES-256-CBC with a key held only on our application servers. See Section 7 for details.
• Instagram Direct Message Content: When an end-user sends a Direct Message to a merchant's connected Instagram account, we receive the message text, the sender's Instagram user ID, the conversation thread ID, and the Meta message ID. We do not receive the sender's email, phone number, or profile photo. Message content is retained for the period described in Section 9.

3. How We Use Your Information

Having accurate information about you permits us to provide you with a smooth, efficient, and customized experience. Specifically, we may use information collected about you via the Site to:

• Respond to your product and customer service requests.
• Send you technical notices, updates, security alerts, and administrative messages (e.g., via Resend).
• Evaluate your eligibility for our early access and adoption programs.
• Monitor and analyze usage and trends to improve your experience with the Site.
• Provide, operate, and improve our Instagram DM automation feature — specifically: authenticate the merchant's connection to Meta, receive inbound Direct Messages via Meta's webhook, generate automated replies using a large language model, and send those replies back to the end-user through Meta's Messenger Send API.

4. Disclosure of Your Information

We may share information we have collected about you in certain situations. We may share your information with third-party vendors, service providers, contractors, or agents who perform services for us or on your behalf. These include:

• Meta Platforms, Inc. — as a sub-processor for our Instagram DM automation feature. We share outbound reply text and recipient identifiers with Meta only as required to deliver the reply through the Instagram Messenger Send API. See Section 8 for details.
• Anthropic, P.B.C. — we forward inbound DM text to Anthropic's Claude API in order to generate automated replies. Anthropic processes the message under their API Terms and their standard data usage policy (no training on your inputs by default).
• Database hosting providers (e.g., Supabase) and email communication platforms (e.g., Resend).

We do not sell your personal information to third parties.

5. Security of Your Information

We use administrative, technical, and physical security measures to help protect your personal information. Page access tokens received from Meta are stored encrypted at rest using AES-256-CBC; the encryption key is held in environment variables and never written to disk or logs. Inbound webhook deliveries from Meta are verified using HMAC-SHA256 signature checks before any processing. While we have taken reasonable steps to secure the personal information you provide to us, please be aware that despite our efforts, no security measures are perfect or impenetrable, and no method of data transmission can be guaranteed against any interception or other type of misuse.

6. Contact Us

If you have questions or comments about this Privacy Policy, please contact us at: support@chataxon.com.

7. Instagram Integration — Data We Receive From Meta

Our Instagram DM automation feature is offered as an optional integration to merchants on the Hobby plan and above. When a merchant chooses to enable the integration, they initiate a standard Meta authorization flow (either at facebook.com or instagram.com/oauth/authorize, depending on merchant configuration) and grant ChatAxon the following permissions:

• instagram_business_basic — to read the merchant's Instagram Business account basic profile (numeric user ID, @username).
• instagram_business_manage_messages — to read inbound Direct Messages sent to the connected Instagram account and to send replies on the merchant's behalf.
• pages_show_list — to enumerate the Facebook Pages the merchant administers in order to find the one that owns the Instagram Business account.
• pages_manage_metadata — to subscribe the Facebook Page to our webhook so Meta delivers new DM events to our server in real time.

We do not request, and Meta does not provide to us through this flow: the merchant's Instagram password, email address, phone number, follower list, posts, story content, or any data unrelated to the four scopes above. The merchant may revoke any of these permissions at any time from Facebook's Connected Apps settings, and the revocation is honoured by our system within a few minutes via Meta's deauthorization webhook.

8. Instagram Direct Messages — How We Handle End-User Data

When an end-user sends a Direct Message to a merchant's connected Instagram account, the following happens:

• Meta delivers the message to our webhook endpoint, signed with HMAC-SHA256. We verify the signature before doing anything else. Messages with invalid signatures are dropped silently and logged for security review.
• We resolve the recipient Instagram user ID to a ChatAxon tenant using the mapping in tenant_instagram_config. If no tenant is mapped, or the tenant's integration is disabled, we acknowledge the webhook (HTTP 200) without processing the message, so Meta does not retry.
• We check the merchant's per-tenant settings: master toggle, working hours, schedule, and rule overrides. If a rule or the schedule causes the message to be skipped (for example, the merchant is outside working hours and chose "paused"), we drop the reply and store an entry in instagram_conversations with the appropriate skipped_reason.
• Otherwise we fetch the recent conversation history for that thread (typically the last ~10 messages) from our own database, forward the new inbound message plus that context to Anthropic's Claude API to generate a reply, and post the reply back to the end-user through Meta's Send API.
• Both the inbound message and the outbound reply are persisted in instagram_conversations along with the Meta message ID, the LLM model used, token usage, and end-to-end latency. Message ID uniqueness prevents duplicate processing if Meta retries the webhook.

We use the message content only to generate a reply and to maintain the per-thread context window for the LLM. We do not use it for advertising, profiling, marketing automation, or training of any AI model. We do not sell DM content or share it with anyone except Meta (as required to deliver the reply) and Anthropic (as required to generate it).

9. Retention of Instagram Message Data

We retain Instagram DM data for the following periods:

• Conversation log (instagram_conversations): 90 days from created_at. After 90 days the row is deleted by a scheduled job. This window is required so the LLM has recent context for follow-up messages in the same thread, and so merchants can review recent activity in their analytics dashboard.
• Page access tokens (tenant_instagram_config.page_access_token_enc): for as long as the merchant keeps the integration enabled. Tokens are deleted (the row is removed) within 60 seconds of a merchant disconnecting the integration, and the encryption key is rotated on a quarterly schedule.
• Webhook verify tokens: deleted together with the connection row. They are never used after disconnect.

End-users (recipients of the merchant's automated replies) who wish to request deletion of messages that involve their Instagram user ID prior to the 90-day expiry may contact us at support@chataxon.com. We will action the request within 30 days and notify the merchant. Note that Meta retains an independent copy of all DMs on its own infrastructure under Meta's privacy policy; we cannot delete data we do not hold, but we can ask you to contact Meta directly for that.

10. Meta Platforms, Inc. as a Sub-processor

For the Instagram DM automation feature, Meta Platforms, Inc. acts as our sub-processor for the limited purpose of: delivering inbound DM webhooks to our server, and delivering our outbound reply text to the end-user's Instagram inbox. Our use of information received from Meta Graph APIs is restricted in accordance with the Meta Platform Terms and the Meta Privacy Policy, including restrictions on transfers to third parties and on use for advertising. We do not transfer any Instagram data we receive to any advertising network, data broker, or analytics vendor other than as required to operate the reply pipeline described in Section 8.

11. Changes to This Privacy Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we do, we will revise the "Last updated" date at the top of this page. If the changes are material — for example, if we start retaining message data for a longer period, start sharing data with a new sub-processor, or change the purposes for which we use Instagram data — we will notify merchants by email at least 30 days before the change takes effect, and we will display an in-app banner in the ChatAxon dashboard prompting merchants to review the change. Continued use of the Instagram DM integration after the effective date of any change constitutes acceptance of the updated policy.