Privacy policy

HeyDeacon Limited (“HeyDeacon”) builds Deacon, an AI support agent that answers customers’ questions inside your product. Handling personal information carefully is part of doing that job properly, and this policy explains what HeyDeacon collects, why, and what you can ask HeyDeacon to do about it.

It covers the HeyDeacon website, the Deacon dashboard, the embedded widget, and the other HeyDeacon services (the “Services”). Using them means this policy applies to you. It sits alongside the Terms of use.

1. Information HeyDeacon collects

Information you provide. When you register, subscribe, or get in touch, HeyDeacon collects things like your name, email address, phone number, billing and address details, and what you say about your role, company, industry, and what you want to use Deacon for.

Content. The documentation, URLs, help material, and other content you give Deacon to learn from, plus the conversations Deacon has with your customers through the widget.

Your customers’ visits. When someone opens the widget on your site, HeyDeacon records their IP address and works out which country it belongs to, using the DB-IP Lite database from db-ip.com. The IP address is deleted after thirty days. The country is kept, so you can see where the people who talk to Deacon are. Conversations you test in the Playground record neither.

Log data. Your browser sends information automatically: IP address, browser type and settings, the dates and times of requests, and how you interacted with the Services.

Usage data. HeyDeacon records which features you use, what you interact with, and details such as time zone, country, access times, user agent, device type, and connection information.

Device information. Device name, operating system, browser, and device identifiers. The exact set depends on your device and its settings.

Cookies and analytics. HeyDeacon uses cookies to run the Services and improve how they work, along with analytics products that set their own cookies to show how people use Deacon. Your browser can be set to refuse cookies or warn you before accepting them, though some parts of the Services may not work properly if you do.

2. How HeyDeacon uses information

HeyDeacon uses the information it collects to:

• provide, run, maintain, and analyse the Services, including answering your customers’ questions;
• improve the Services and carry out research, including training and improving the machine learning models behind Deacon;
• communicate with you about the Services, changes to them, and events;
• prevent fraud, deter criminal activity, and protect the security of the Services and the people using them;
• handle a business transfer, such as a merger or acquisition;
• comply with HeyDeacon’s legal obligations and protect the rights of HeyDeacon and its users.

Aggregated and de-identified data. HeyDeacon may aggregate or de-identify information so it no longer identifies anyone, and use it to measure how well the Services work, develop features, and conduct research. Where that happens, the information stays in that state, and HeyDeacon won’t try to re-identify it unless the law requires it.

3. When HeyDeacon shares information

HeyDeacon doesn’t sell your personal information, and shares it only in these situations:

• Suppliers and service providers. Hosting, cloud infrastructure, AI model providers, email delivery, analytics, payments, customer support, and IT providers. They may only handle your information on HeyDeacon’s instructions and on HeyDeacon’s behalf.
• Business transfers. In a merger, acquisition, reorganisation, insolvency, or sale of assets, information may be disclosed to the parties involved and transferred to a successor or affiliate.
• Legal reasons. Where the law requires it, or where HeyDeacon reasonably needs to in order to protect its rights or property, investigate a breach of the Terms of use or the law, prevent fraud, protect the safety of users or the public, or prevent legal liability.
• Affiliates. Companies under common control with HeyDeacon, which must handle it consistently with this policy.
• Business account administrators. If your account belongs to an organisation’s Deacon account, its administrators can access and control it.
• Other people, at your direction. Some features let you share information, for example a shared conversation log. It’s up to you to decide who you trust with it.

4. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to ask HeyDeacon to:

• give you access to your personal information and explain how it is processed;
• delete it;
• correct or update it;
• transfer it to you or a third party in a portable format;
• restrict how it is processed, or object to processing;
• withdraw your consent, where HeyDeacon relied on consent to process it.

Email hello@heydeacon.com to exercise any of these. You also have the right to complain to your local data protection authority. In the UK, that’s the Information Commissioner’s Office.

5. Children

The Services aren’t aimed at children under 13, and HeyDeacon doesn’t knowingly collect their personal information. If you believe a child has provided information, write to hello@heydeacon.com and HeyDeacon will look into it and delete it. Users between 13 and 18 need a parent or guardian’s permission to use the Services.

6. Links to other sites

The Services may link to websites and social media HeyDeacon doesn’t run. Those sites have their own privacy policies and terms, and a link isn’t an endorsement. If you want to know how they handle your information, ask them directly.

7. Security and retention

HeyDeacon takes commercially reasonable technical, administrative, and organisational measures to protect information from loss, misuse, and unauthorised access, disclosure, alteration, or destruction. No method of transmission over the internet is completely secure, though, so please be careful about what you send, and HeyDeacon can’t take responsibility for anyone circumventing its security or that of a third-party site.

How long HeyDeacon keeps personal information depends on why it holds it: how long it is needed to provide the Services, the amount and sensitivity of the data, the risk of harm from unauthorised use, and what must be kept for legal, security, or dispute resolution purposes.

8. International users and legal bases

HeyDeacon processes and stores personal information on servers in the United States, and may disclose it to service providers and affiliates in other countries. Where information leaves the UK or the EEA, HeyDeacon relies on legally valid transfer mechanisms, such as the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses, to keep it protected.

If you’re in the UK or the EEA, HeyDeacon’s legal bases for processing are:

• Performance of a contract. To provide and maintain the Services. Your account information, content, and technical information are necessary to deliver them.
• Legitimate interests. To protect the Services from abuse, fraud, and security risks, and to develop, improve, and promote them, including training HeyDeacon’s machine learning models. You can object to this processing at any time.
• Consent. Where HeyDeacon has asked for it for a specific purpose. You can withdraw it at any time.
• Legal obligations. To comply with the law and protect the rights, safety, and property of HeyDeacon’s users, its affiliates, and others.

9. Changes to this policy

HeyDeacon may update this policy from time to time, posting the new version on this page and updating the date at the top, unless the law requires notice another way.

10. Contact HeyDeacon

If you have a question or concern this policy doesn’t answer, email hello@heydeacon.com and HeyDeacon will come back to you.