Sydonia Privacy Policy

Effective 13 October 2026. Sydonia is a service operated by Qelia, a French limited liability company (SARL), 47 rue Vivienne, 75002 Paris, France (R.C.S. Paris 106 242 407).

Sydonia is an AI sales assistant, "Syd", that online shops use to talk with their customers: in a window on the shop's website, by written message, voice message or a voice call in the browser, and on WhatsApp. Syd answers their questions and, where the shop uses it, follows up an incomplete checkout or a failed payment. This policy explains what personal data passes through Sydonia, why, who receives it, how long it is kept, and how to have it deleted. Section 13 covers the people who use Sydonia for a business.

1. Who is responsible for your data

When a shop uses Sydonia to talk with you, that shop decides why and how your data is used: it is the data controller. Qelia operates Sydonia on the shop's behalf as data processor, acting on the shop's instructions.

When you visit sydonia.ai, including the Sydonia console, Qelia is the controller of the analytics and advertising-measurement data described in section 14.

You can ask the shop, or us, to correct or erase your data, using the details in section 11.

2. What data Sydonia processes

Data	Where it comes from	Why
WhatsApp phone number	The shop's checkout, or your own message or call to the shop's number	To send and receive WhatsApp messages and calls, and to honour opt-outs
First name	The shop's checkout	To address you by name
Cart contents, order total, currency, checkout and order identifiers, the shop's recovery link	The shop's checkout	To refer to what you were buying and to send at most one outreach message per basket
Content of the messages you send and receive in the shop's website window or on WhatsApp, including voice messages	You and Sydonia	To hold the conversation and answer your questions
Audio of calls with Sydonia, whether you start the call from the shop's website window ("Call me") or on WhatsApp, and a transcript of what is said	You and Sydonia	To hold the call. Calls are recorded so that the conversation can be reviewed and the service improved; this policy is how we tell you.
Delivery and read status of messages	WhatsApp	To know whether a message arrived and to avoid resending
Your IP address	Your browser, when you open a Sydonia window	Only if your browser doesn't tell us your language: to estimate your country once and open the window in that language. It is not stored or logged.
An identifier of your conversation	Saved in your browser by the shop's website window	So that the conversation continues when you move to another page of the shop
Opt-out and consent records	You (for example, replying STOP) and the shop's recorded marketing consent	To prove and enforce that you asked us to stop, and that you agreed to be contacted
Calendar data from a shop's connected Google or Microsoft calendar: free and busy times, calendar names, and events Sydonia creates (section 12)	The shop, through its calendar connection	To offer you free appointment times and book the one you accept
Store data the shop's Shopify account shares with Sydonia: products, inventory, orders, customers, draft orders, discounts, policies	The shop, through the Sydonia Shopify app	To answer your questions about the shop's products, orders and policies, and to prepare a cart or a discount where the shop allows it
Analytics and advertising-measurement data, only if you accept analytics cookies on sydonia.ai (section 14)	Your browser	To understand how visitors use sydonia.ai and improve it

Sydonia does not process payment card details and never asks for them in a conversation. It does not build advertising profiles and does not sell your data.

3. When we message you, and how to stop

Sydonia sends an outreach message only where the shop recorded your marketing consent at checkout, and within the limits WhatsApp allows. When you write to or call Syd yourself, in the shop's website window or on the shop's WhatsApp number, we process your data to answer the request you started.

Reply STOP at any time. The opt-out is recorded and further outreach stops. An opt-out is not reversed automatically: only an explicit action by you re-enables messages. Sydonia sends at most one outreach message per abandoned basket.

4. Who else receives your data

This is Sydonia's sub-processor list. Merchants receive notice before a new sub-processor is added and may object. The notice period is 30 days. List version 4, 13 October 2026.

Sub-processor	Role	Where
Meta Platforms (WhatsApp Business Platform)	Delivers WhatsApp messages and calls. Your use of WhatsApp is also governed by Meta's own privacy policy.	US / global
Google Cloud (projects in `europe-west1`, Belgium, and `europe-west9`, France)	Hosting, database and storage of conversation records and call recordings, and of the knowledge Syd draws from the shop's website	EU (Belgium, France)
Google (Gemini models, speech-to-text, text-to-speech)	Generates the assistant's replies and its speech, and transcribes speech. Gemini models run on the Gemini Developer API, which offers no fixed processing region; Google Cloud Speech-to-Text runs in the EU. Except over live voice connections, Google keeps what Sydonia sends to Gemini, and Gemini's answers, as logs private to our Google Cloud project (section 6).	EU and global
Google (Identity Platform and Google Workspace)	Signs business users in to the Sydonia console, and sends Sydonia's emails, such as a hand-off of your request to the shop's team	Global
Shopify	Source of the shop's store data, through the Sydonia app	Canada / US
OpenAI	Generates the assistant's replies in written conversations (the website window's chat and WhatsApp messages); when it is unavailable, Google Gemini generates them instead. In some calls, it also writes the short lines the assistant says while it prepares its answer	US
Anthropic	Backup model that can generate the assistant's replies	US
Alibaba Cloud (Qwen speech models)	Speaks the assistant's replies, unless the shop turns off Asia hosting	Asia
Amazon Web Services (Amazon Nova Sonic)	Listens and speaks in test calls a business places in the Sydonia console's Simulator with a Nova voice	EU (Sweden)
ElevenLabs	Speaks the assistant's replies in Simulator test calls that use an ElevenLabs voice, offered to Qelia staff only	US storage, global processing
DIDWW (DIDWW Ireland Limited)	Supplies the WhatsApp numbers set up in the Sydonia console, and receives what a number's country requires: the phone that takes Meta's verification call and, in some countries, the identity and registration documents of the business that uses the number	EU (Ireland), with transfers outside the EEA, including the USA and Singapore

The shop you were dealing with also receives the outcome of the conversation, as the controller of your data. Your data is therefore processed outside the EEA. We rely on the providers' contractual data-protection terms, including standard contractual clauses where they apply.

Your WhatsApp number is used only to deliver WhatsApp messages and calls; Sydonia does not send it to any model provider. A phone number written in digits in the conversation is redacted out of the text sent to a model. One said aloud in a call is not redacted from the call audio, which Google's logs keep only for a part of the call that could not be transcribed (section 6).

5. How your conversation is and is not used

Never used for:

Training the providers' models. The conversation is sent to the providers above to generate a reply, and Google also keeps a copy as logs so that we can review conversations, while OpenAI keeps the written conversations it receives for 30 days (section 6). We may use anonymised conversations and call recordings to train and improve our own models, but never data obtained through a calendar connection (section 12); the model providers do not use them to train theirs.
Advertising. No profile is built about you.
Sale. Your data is not sold.

On the shop's instruction, Sydonia may turn conversations into anonymous counts, such as how often carts are abandoned over delivery cost, and may combine those counts across shops to improve the service. Only structured facts are taken; what you wrote and anything that identifies you is not carried into those figures. No figure is produced from a single conversation, customer or shop.

6. How long it is kept

Conversation transcripts: kept until you or the shop ask us to delete them. We will publish a fixed retention period once automatic deletion is in place.
Call recordings: 30 days, then deleted automatically.
Opt-out and consent records: kept beyond that period, to prove we honoured your opt-out. They are kept for as long as needed to keep honouring your opt-out.
Short-lived delivery records used to avoid duplicate sends: 48 hours.
Data held on the Shopify app side: removed when a shop uninstalls the app, or when Shopify sends a customer or shop erasure request. This happens within 30 days of the request.
Calendar sign-in tokens: deleted when the shop disconnects its calendar (section 12).
Copies of written conversations kept by OpenAI (section 4), so that each reply can build on the previous one: 30 days, then deleted by OpenAI. A request to delete your data does not delete them sooner.
Copies of the conversation kept in Google's logs (section 4), including the audio of any part of a call that could not be transcribed: 55 days, then marked for deletion by Google. A request to delete your data does not delete them sooner.

7. How it is protected

Phone numbers are treated as personal data throughout and are redacted in our own logs and in the text sent to a model, within the limits set out in section 4.
Each shop's data is stored in a separate area, reachable by the service's own credentials only.
Credentials and keys are held in a managed secret store, never in code. Calendar sign-in tokens are covered in section 12.
Incoming requests from WhatsApp and from Shopify are cryptographically verified and rejected if the signature does not match.

8. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct or erase the personal data we hold about you, to object to or restrict its use, to withdraw consent, and to complain to your data-protection authority. Because the shop is the controller, the quickest route is usually the shop, but you can contact us directly and we will help.

9. If you are in the UAE

Sydonia is built for shops selling in the UAE and the wider GCC, so UAE Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021 (PDPL) is likely to apply to many conversations. Consent is specific and withdrawable: replying STOP withdraws it. We process only what the conversation needs. Your data is processed outside the UAE (Google Cloud Belgium, Meta, Google's email service, model and speech providers). Under the PDPL you have rights of access, correction, erasure, restriction and objection, and the right to complain to the UAE Data Office.

10. User data deletion

You can ask for your data to be deleted at any time:

Send a message to the shop's WhatsApp number saying you want your data deleted; or
Email quentin@qelia.ai with the WhatsApp number you used, and we will identify the conversations linked to it.

We will delete the conversation transcripts, call recordings and call transcripts linked to that number, and keep only the opt-out record needed to keep honouring an opt-out; the copies in Google's logs and those kept by OpenAI are kept until their periods in section 6 end. We will answer within 30 days. We will confirm by message or email once our deletion is done.

Meta's data-deletion requirement: this section is the "User data deletion" instructions for the WhatsApp app "Sydonia".

11. Privacy contact

For privacy questions and data-protection requests, contact Qelia at quentin@qelia.ai, or write to Qelia, 47 rue Vivienne, 75002 Paris, France.

12. Calendar connections (Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook)

A shop can connect its own Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook calendar to Sydonia so that Syd can offer you appointment times. The shop connects by signing in to its own account, from a one-time link. This section covers the data obtained through that connection, which belongs to the shop, not to you as a customer.

What we access. From Google: the free and busy times of the shop's calendars, the list of calendars the shop owns, and the right to create events on them. From Microsoft: the same, through calendar read-write access and a sign-in that stays valid. We never access event titles, descriptions, locations or attendees.
How we use it. To offer a customer free times for an appointment type and to book the one they accept, as an event named as the shop chose. No customer contact details are written into the calendar.
How it is shared. The free times are passed to the AI model that writes Syd's reply (Google Gemini or OpenAI, section 4) for that conversation only. They are never sold and never used for advertising.
No AI training. Data obtained through a calendar connection, including data from Google APIs, is never used to develop, improve or train any AI or machine-learning model, ours or a provider's, and is excluded from the anonymised training described in section 5.
How it is protected. Sign-in tokens are encrypted in Google Cloud Secret Manager and are never shown in a browser or written to logs.
Retention and deletion. Free times offered in a conversation are deleted with the conversation record (section 6). When the shop disconnects its calendar, the sign-in token is deleted at once and Google's access is revoked. The shop can also revoke Sydonia's access at any time from its Google or Microsoft account settings.
Limited Use. Sydonia's use and transfer to any other app of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

13. If you use Sydonia for a business

This section covers the members of a business's Sydonia console, the people invited to it, and the visitors of a private Sydonia demo. For this data, Qelia decides why and how it is used.

Your console account. Your name, email address and, unless you sign in with Google, a password; the businesses and sites you can reach, your role and your last activity. Sign-in is handled by Google Identity Platform (section 4).
Invitations. When an admin invites you, we email the invitation to the address the admin entered.
What you enter in the console, such as a request to test Sydonia on your own website, with your phone number, company and website.
Tests in the console's Simulator. Your messages and calls with Syd are processed by the providers in section 4 like a customer conversation, and calls are recorded like customer calls (section 6).
Private demos. If a business shares a private demo with you, you enter your work email and we email you a 6-digit code that opens it; you get no account. If a business names you as the person who consents to a demo, we email you a one-time link and record your answer.
WhatsApp number setup. When an admin sets up a WhatsApp number in the console, the phone that takes Meta's verification call and, in some countries, the identity and registration documents the number requires are sent to DIDWW (section 4).

Sydonia's emails are sent through Google Workspace (section 4). To exercise your rights over this data (section 8), contact us (section 11).

14. Visitors to sydonia.ai: analytics and advertising cookies

This section is about visiting sydonia.ai, including the Sydonia console at sydonia.ai/console. For this, Qelia is the data controller.

When you first visit, a banner asks for two separate choices, and nothing is ticked in advance: analytics, so that we can understand how visitors use the site and improve it; and advertising, so that Google Ads can count which of our ads brought you to sydonia.ai and whether you then created an account or asked for a demo. Advertising can only be chosen together with analytics. Until you accept analytics, no Google script loads and nothing is sent to Google.

If you accept analytics, Google Analytics, loaded through Google Tag Manager, sets cookies (_ga and _ga_ followed by an identifier) holding a random identifier, kept for up to 13 months, and records the pages you view (in the console, only the type of page, with names, numbers and other identifiers removed), when you view them, how you arrived (the referring site or campaign), your device type, browser, operating system, screen size and language, and your approximate location (country and city), which Google derives from your IP address. Google states that Google Analytics does not log or store IP addresses.

If you also accept advertising, the Google tag stores the identifier of the ad you clicked in cookies (_gcl_au, and _gcl_aw when you arrive from an ad), kept for up to 90 days, and Google Analytics tells Google Ads when that visit led to an account or a demo request, so that it is counted for our ad. We do not use this to show you personalised ads, and we do not use Google signals or remarketing.

We do not send your name, email address, phone number or account identifier to Google.

Google Ireland Limited processes the analytics data for us under Google's data processing terms. When conversions are shared with Google Ads, Google uses them as an independent controller under the Google Ads Controller-Controller Data Protection Terms. Google may process data in the United States; Google LLC is certified under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. We keep analytics data for 14 months.

Our legal basis is your consent, given separately for each choice. You can change or withdraw either at any time with the Cookie settings link at the bottom of the home page, or in your account menu in the console. No further data is then collected for that choice, and its cookies are deleted. Your choices are stored in your browser so that we do not ask on every visit, and are not sent to us or to Google. We ask again after 6 months.

15. Changes

If this policy changes materially, the effective date above changes and the current version stays at this address.