Shopper privacy notice

This notice is for shoppers who use the Ethere assistant on a store's website. Ethere provides the assistant; the store decides to run it, so the store is the party responsible for the shopper's personal data and Ethere handles it on the store's instructions — Terms of Service Section 16 and Section 18, and the Data Processing Agreement, describe that arrangement. A store may publish this notice as it stands, adapt it, or write its own; where a store adapts it, the store's own wording governs the store's relationship with the shopper. Questions about a particular store's use of the assistant go to that store first.

What the assistant collects

When the assistant runs on a store's page, it collects: the messages the shopper writes and the assistant's replies; the page the conversation happened on (the page path, and the host of the referring page — never the query string or the full address); and, where the store has turned on lead capture, the name, email address, and question the shopper submits. It also records four engagement events — the assistant loading, the assistant being opened, a teaser being clicked, and a suggested question being clicked — and a randomly generated visitor identifier, so a conversation can continue across pages. The identifier is a single random token, not a compiled profile: it does not identify the shopper by name, it is not combined with other identifiers, and it is not used to follow the shopper across other websites.

Why, and for how long

The data is used to answer the shopper's question, to keep the conversation together, to let the store's team help when a shopper asks for a person, and to give the store aggregate engagement figures. Conversations and messages are deleted seven days after the last activity in them, and a shopper keeps at most ten conversations with a store: starting another replaces the oldest first. The visitor identifier and the engagement events are deleted after thirty days; the daily totals derived from them contain no identifier and are kept for twelve months. Leads are kept while the store's assistant that holds them exists, and special categories of personal data are not requested and should not be entered.

Saying who is answering

The assistant is an artificial intelligence system, not a person. It is presented as such, within the widget, and the disclosure is designed to be visible at the first interaction. The shopper may ask for a person, and the store's team may join the conversation.

Cookies and similar technologies

The assistant stores the visitor identifier and the identifier of any conversation in progress in the browser's local storage on the store's own domain. That storage is read only by the assistant's own code, is not shared with anyone else, and can be removed at any time by clearing the site's data in the browser. The assistant sets no advertising or analytics cookies. The detail of the cookies the Ethere website and dashboard themselves use is in Ethere's Cookie Policy, which is about Ethere's own site rather than a store's.

Who processes it

Ethere uses a small number of providers to run the assistant, under written data-protection terms: Mistral AI (France) to generate the answers and the search embeddings; Hetzner (Germany) for hosting, inside the European Union; and Cloudflare for content delivery and the anti-abuse check on the store's public forms. Ethere's data is stored in the European Union, and a provider outside the European Economic Area is engaged only under the Standard Contractual Clauses. The full list, with what each provider does and where it processes data, is published at ethere.cloud/subprocessors; Ethere never sells personal data.

Rights and contact

Because the store decides why the assistant runs on its site, a shopper's request to see, correct, delete, or restrict the use of their data should go to the store first. Ethere assists the store in answering such a request, as the Data Processing Agreement provides. Ethere's own privacy notices, and the rights that apply to Ethere's own customer relationships, are in the Privacy Policy. Questions about how Ethere handles data on a store's behalf go to privacy@ethere.cloud; abuse or unlawful content is reported to abuse@ethere.cloud, as the Acceptable Use Policy explains.