Legal
Privacy Policy
bonedesk is a customer-service platform for online stores. This policy explains what personal information we handle, why, who we share it with, and the choices you have - whether you visit bonedesk.com, work in a bonedesk workspace, or talk to a store that uses bonedesk.
1. Who this covers
Three kinds of people reach bonedesk, and the rules differ for each:
- Visitors and applicants - anyone on bonedesk.com, including merchants who apply for an account.
- Workspace members - people who sign in to a workspace (
yourcompany.bonedesk.com) to run a store's customer service: owners, admins, agents and viewers. - A store's customers - people who chat with a store's assistant (on the store's own site through the live chat widget, or in the store's support console), or whose support tickets, emails or text messages the store routes through bonedesk.
If you are a store's customer, the store (we call it the merchant) decides what is collected and why. bonedesk processes that information on the merchant's instructions, as its service provider or "processor". The merchant's own privacy policy applies to you, and requests about your information go to the merchant (see section 9). This policy tells you what bonedesk does with it along the way.
"bonedesk", "we" and "us" mean the operator of the bonedesk service and of bonedesk.com. How to reach us is in section 12.
2. What we collect
Visitors and applicants
- Merchant applications - what you type into the form on bonedesk.com: your name, email address, store name and address, platform, channels, volumes, and anything you add.
- Bot protection and rate limits - your IP address is used to verify the form with Cloudflare Turnstile and to limit applications to a few per hour per address.
- Request logs - IP address, browser type, pages requested and timestamps, the ordinary web-server record, kept for a short time for security and reliability.
bonedesk.com runs no advertising trackers and sets no analytics cookies.
Workspace members
- Sign-in - bonedesk uses Clerk for sign-in. When you sign in with Google or GitHub we receive your name, email address, profile picture and the account identifier the provider assigns, together with whether the email address is verified. With the email-code option, your email address. We ask for nothing else: no access to your Gmail, Google Drive, Calendar, repositories or contacts.
- Invitations and roles - which workspaces you belong to, your role in each, and who invited or changed it.
- Activity - an audit log records security-relevant actions (an account bound to a login, changes to members, roles, settings and knowledge), visible to your workspace's owners and admins.
- What you add - messages you send to the assistant in a workspace, settings, documents and files you upload.
- Session cookies - see section 5.
A store's customers (processed for the merchant)
- The conversation - messages, the assistant's and the team's replies, ratings, timestamps and the channel (web chat, SMS, email, support ticket).
- The identity the customer gives - first and last name, email address and phone number, verified by a one-time code where the merchant requires it, or by the customer's login on the merchant's store.
- What is looked up to answer - order, shipment, payment and ticket details from the systems the merchant has connected (for example WooCommerce, ShipStation, Zendesk, a payment gateway), affiliate status, and risk decisions from the merchant's fraud-prevention tool. Lookups are bound to the identified customer: a customer only ever sees their own records.
- Files - photos, screenshots, videos and documents a customer attaches. They are scanned and served back only to the person who sent them, or attached to the support ticket.
- Requests - cancellations, address changes, refunds, forms. These are filed as tickets for the merchant's team; bonedesk never changes an order or a payment itself.
- Email and SMS - where the merchant routes them through bonedesk.
3. How we use it
- To provide the service - answer questions, look up orders, file and follow tickets, keep a conversation going across channels, hand off to a person.
- To keep it safe - authenticate members, enforce roles, isolate each merchant's data, detect abuse and fraud, rate-limit, scan uploads, keep audit logs.
- To run and improve it - measure what the assistant answered and what needed a person, check classification accuracy, fix problems, support merchants. A merchant's conversation data is used for that merchant's workspace: we do not use one merchant's data to build features for another, and we do not train general-purpose AI models on it.
- To communicate - respond to applications and tell merchants about the service.
- To meet legal obligations and enforce our terms.
We do not sell personal information, and we do not use it for advertising.
4. AI processing
bonedesk's assistant is built on large language models from third parties. xAI's models write replies and decide what to look up; TypeSafe's models classify messages - topic, urgency, compliance signals, frustration. For each turn, the conversation, the merchant's instructions and knowledge, and the records looked up to answer are sent to these providers, and the results come back to the workspace. They receive only what is needed for the turn and act as our service providers.
The assistant answers routine questions. Anything that must change - an order, a refund, an address - becomes a request for a human on the merchant's team. A customer can ask for a person at any time, and the merchant's team can see every conversation.
5. Cookies and local storage
- Sign-in - Clerk sets session cookies on
.bonedesk.comso one sign-in works on every workspace you have access to. - Bot protection - Cloudflare Turnstile, on the application form, may set a cookie to tell people from bots.
- Remembering your workspace - the sign-in box on bonedesk.com keeps the last workspace name you typed in your browser's local storage.
- Live chat on a store - the widget keeps a signed visitor token in the store page's storage so your conversation continues from page to page. It identifies the conversation, not you, until you verify your email address.
There are no advertising or cross-site tracking cookies. Cloudflare, which serves the site, may measure performance in aggregate without cookies.
6. Who we share it with
Service providers, acting on our instructions and bound to use the data only to provide their service to us:
- Cloudflare - hosting, networking, file storage, bot protection and security
- Clerk - sign-in and sessions
- PlanetScale - the database
- xAI and TypeSafe - the AI models described in section 4
- Resend - transactional email, and Twilio - SMS, where a merchant uses them
The merchant's own systems. A merchant connects its own accounts - a help desk, a store platform, a shipping service, a payment gateway, affiliate and fraud-prevention tools. What bonedesk reads from or writes to them (a ticket, an internal note) is held in the merchant's account under the merchant's agreement with that provider.
Legal and safety. When required by law, or to protect the rights, safety and integrity of bonedesk, our merchants and their customers.
Business transfers. If bonedesk is acquired or merges, the information may transfer with it; this policy continues to apply until it is changed, with notice.
Google account data. bonedesk's use of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. The Google account information we receive at sign-in (name, email address, profile picture) is used only to sign you in and recognise your account. It is stored by Clerk to operate sign-in, is not shared with anyone else, and is never used for advertising.
7. Where it is processed
bonedesk runs on Cloudflare's network and stores data in the United States. If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland, your information is transferred to the United States under the safeguards our providers offer for such transfers, such as standard contractual clauses.
8. How long we keep it
- Applications - while they are being considered and for up to twelve months afterwards, unless an account is opened.
- Workspace accounts - while the account and its memberships exist. A removed member's entries stay in the workspace's audit log, which is the merchant's record.
- Conversations and files - for as long as the merchant keeps them. Merchants can delete conversations and uploads from their console. When a merchant's account closes, its data is deleted within thirty days, apart from backups that expire on their own schedule and records we are required to keep.
- Request logs - for a short, fixed period, for security and reliability.
9. Your choices and rights
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, delete or receive a copy of your personal information, to restrict or object to how it is used, and to complain to a supervisory authority. We honour these rights whatever your location, as far as we are able.
- A store's customer - contact the store. We help merchants fulfil these requests and act on their instructions. If you write to us about a merchant's data, we will point you to the merchant or pass your request on.
- Workspace members and applicants - write to us (section 12). We will verify the request and answer within the time the law allows.
We never treat anyone differently for exercising a right. We do not sell or share personal information for advertising, so there is nothing to opt out of; we treat a Global Privacy Control signal as an opt-out all the same.
10. Security
Everything travels over TLS. Each merchant's data is isolated in the database by row-level security that the database itself enforces: a request for one merchant cannot read or write another's rows, whatever it asks for. Access is governed by roles and permissions, sign-in requires a second factor, every security-relevant change is written to an audit log, public endpoints authenticate with signatures and signed tokens, uploads are scanned and served only to their sender, and credentials are held on the platform, never in the browser. No system is perfectly secure; if you believe something is wrong, tell us (section 12) and we will look at once.
11. Children
bonedesk is a service for businesses and is not directed to children under 16. We do not knowingly collect their information. Merchants are responsible for the audiences of their own stores.
12. Changes and contact
When this policy changes we post the new version here with a new effective date, and we tell merchants about material changes. Questions, requests and concerns: bones@bonesrnd.com.
See also our Terms of Service.