Privacy Policy

Last updated: April 7, 2026


This Privacy Notice for Catchwhen ("we," "us," or "our"), describes how and why we might access, collect, store, use, and/or share ("process") your personal information when you use our services ("Services"), including when you:

  • Visit our website at https://catchwhen.com or any website of ours that links to this Privacy Notice
  • Use our AI Chatbot Service. CatchWhen provides an AI chatbot platform for local businesses, allowing them to deploy a custom AI chatbot widget on their website to automatically respond to customer inquiries.
  • Interact with an AI chatbot widget powered by CatchWhen on a third-party business website
  • Engage with us in other related ways, including any marketing or events

Questions or concerns? Reading this Privacy Notice will help you understand your privacy rights and choices. We are responsible for making decisions about how your personal information is processed. If you do not agree with our policies and practices, please do not use our Services. If you still have any questions or concerns, please contact us at support@catchwhen.com.

Summary of Key Points

This summary provides key points from our Privacy Notice, but you can find out more details about any of these topics by clicking the link following each key point or by using our table of contents below to find the section you are looking for.

What personal information do we process? When you visit, use, or navigate our Services, we may process personal information depending on how you interact with us and the Services, the choices you make, and the products and features you use. We collect different types of information from business owners (account holders) and website visitors (who interact with chatbot widgets).

Do we process any sensitive personal information? We do not process sensitive personal information.

Do we collect any information from third parties? We do not collect personal information from third parties. However, our web crawling service (Firecrawl) retrieves publicly available content from business websites that our users provide for chatbot training purposes.

How do we process your information? We process your information to provide, improve, and administer our Services, communicate with you, for security and fraud prevention, and to comply with law. We may also process your information for other purposes with your consent.

In what situations and with which parties do we share personal information? We share information with specific named third-party service providers as detailed in this notice.

How do we keep your information safe? We have adequate organizational and technical processes and procedures in place to protect your personal information. However, no electronic transmission over the internet or information storage technology can be guaranteed to be 100% secure.

What are your rights? Depending on where you are located geographically, the applicable privacy law may mean you have certain rights regarding your personal information.

How do you exercise your rights? The easiest way to exercise your rights is by contacting us at support@catchwhen.com. We will consider and act upon any request in accordance with applicable data protection laws.

1. What Information Do We Collect?

Personal information you disclose to us

In Short: We collect personal information that you provide to us.

We collect personal information that you voluntarily provide to us when you register on the Services, express an interest in obtaining information about us or our products and Services, when you participate in activities on the Services, or otherwise when you contact us.

Information from business owners (account holders)

When you create an account and use the Services as a business owner, we may collect:

  • Names and email addresses (for account registration)
  • Business name, contact information (phone numbers, email addresses, physical addresses, website links)
  • Brand assets (colors, logos) and chatbot configuration preferences
  • Training content you provide (documents, website URLs, FAQs, and other text used to train your AI chatbot)

Information from chatbot widget visitors

When visitors interact with a CatchWhen-powered chatbot widget on a business website, we collect:

  • Chat message content (the text of messages exchanged between the visitor and the chatbot)
  • A randomly generated anonymous visitor identifier (not linked to any personal identity)
  • Optional feedback (thumbs up/down) on chatbot responses

Widget visitors are anonymous by default. No name, email, phone number, or other identifying information is required to use the chatbot. However, visitors may voluntarily share personal information within their chat messages.

Sensitive Information. We do not process sensitive information.

Payment Data. We may collect data necessary to process your payment if you choose to make purchases, such as your payment instrument number, and the security code associated with your payment instrument. All payment data is handled and stored by Stripe. You may find their privacy notice link(s) here: https://stripe.com/privacy.

Google Sign-In Data. We offer the option to register or log in using your Google account. If you choose to do this, we receive your name, email address, and profile picture from Google. We do not receive your Google password, contacts list, or any other Google account data. See Section 7 for more details.

All personal information that you provide to us must be true, complete, and accurate, and you must notify us of any changes to such personal information.

Information automatically collected

In Short: We collect limited technical information automatically when you visit our marketing website and dashboard. Our chatbot widget collects minimal data.

Marketing website and dashboard: We use Google Analytics (GA4) on our marketing website (catchwhen.com) and business dashboard to collect aggregate, non-personally-identifiable usage statistics such as page views and general usage patterns. Google Analytics may use its own cookies to collect this data. Google Analytics is NOT loaded on chatbot widget pages embedded on third-party websites.

Chatbot widget: When visitors use a CatchWhen chatbot widget, we use their IP address solely for in-memory rate limiting to prevent abuse. IP addresses are not stored in any database and are discarded when the server process resets. No other technical data (browser type, device information, operating system, referring URLs) is collected or stored by the widget.

Google API

We use the following Google services: (a) Google OAuth for optional account authentication (limited to basic profile information: name, email, profile picture), and (b) Google Cloud Vision API for extracting text from uploaded document images as part of chatbot training. Our use of information received from Google APIs adheres to Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

2. How Do We Process Your Information?

In Short: We process your information to provide, improve, and administer our Services, communicate with you, for security and fraud prevention, and to comply with law. We may also process your information for other purposes only with your prior explicit consent.

We process your personal information for a variety of reasons, depending on how you interact with our Services, including:

  • To facilitate account creation and authentication and otherwise manage user accounts. We may process your information so you can create and log in to your account, as well as keep your account in working order.
  • To deliver and facilitate delivery of services to the user. We may process your information to provide you with the requested service, including generating AI chatbot responses based on your training content.
  • To respond to user inquiries/offer support to users. We may process your information to respond to your inquiries and solve any potential issues you might have with the requested service.
  • To send administrative information to you. We may process your information to send you details about our products and services, changes to our terms and policies, and other similar information.
  • To fulfill and manage your orders. We may process your information to fulfill and manage your orders, payments, returns, and exchanges made through the Services.
  • To request feedback. We may process your information when necessary to request feedback and to contact you about your use of our Services.
  • To protect our Services. We may process your information as part of our efforts to keep our Services safe and secure, including fraud monitoring and prevention, and rate limiting.
  • To identify usage trends. We may process information about how you use our Services to better understand how they are being used so we can improve them.
  • To generate AI chatbot responses. We transmit your training content and visitor chat messages to third-party AI service providers to generate chatbot responses and create vector embeddings for content retrieval.
  • To save or protect an individual's vital interest. We may process your information when necessary to save or protect an individual's vital interest, such as to prevent harm.

3. What Legal Bases Do We Rely On to Process Your Personal Information?

In Short: We only process your personal information when we believe it is necessary and we have a valid legal reason (i.e., legal basis) to do so under applicable law, like with your consent, to comply with laws, to provide you with services to enter into or fulfill our contractual obligations, to protect your rights, or to fulfill our legitimate business interests.

If you are located in the EU or UK, this section applies to you.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and UK GDPR require us to explain the valid legal bases we rely on in order to process your personal information. As such, we may rely on the following legal bases to process your personal information:

  • Consent. We may process your information if you have given us permission (i.e., consent) to use your personal information for a specific purpose. You can withdraw your consent at any time.
  • Performance of a Contract. We may process your personal information when we believe it is necessary to fulfill our contractual obligations to you, including providing our Services or at your request prior to entering into a contract with you.
  • Legitimate Interests. We may process your information when we believe it is reasonably necessary to achieve our legitimate business interests and those interests do not outweigh your interests and fundamental rights and freedoms. For example, we may process your personal information for some of the purposes described in order to:
    • Analyze how our Services are used so we can improve them to engage and retain users
    • Diagnose problems and/or prevent fraudulent activities
    • Understand how our users use our products and services so we can improve user experience
  • Legal Obligations. We may process your information where we believe it is necessary for compliance with our legal obligations, such as to cooperate with a law enforcement body or regulatory agency, exercise or defend our legal rights, or disclose your information as evidence in litigation in which we are involved.
  • Vital Interests. We may process your information where we believe it is necessary to protect your vital interests or the vital interests of a third party, such as situations involving potential threats to the safety of any person.

If you are located in Canada, this section applies to you.

We may process your information if you have given us specific permission (i.e., express consent) to use your personal information for a specific purpose, or in situations where your permission can be inferred (i.e., implied consent). You can withdraw your consent at any time.

In some exceptional cases, we may be legally permitted under applicable law to process your information without your consent, including, for example:

  • If collection is clearly in the interests of an individual and consent cannot be obtained in a timely way
  • For investigations and fraud detection and prevention
  • For business transactions provided certain conditions are met
  • If it is contained in a witness statement and the collection is necessary to assess, process, or settle an insurance claim
  • For identifying injured, ill, or deceased persons and communicating with next of kin
  • If we have reasonable grounds to believe an individual has been, is, or may be victim of financial abuse
  • If it is reasonable to expect collection and use with consent would compromise the availability or the accuracy of the information and the collection is reasonable for purposes related to investigating a breach of an agreement or a contravention of the laws of Canada or a province
  • If disclosure is required to comply with a subpoena, warrant, court order, or rules of the court relating to the production of records
  • If it was produced by an individual in the course of their employment, business, or profession and the collection is consistent with the purposes for which the information was produced
  • If the collection is solely for journalistic, artistic, or literary purposes
  • If the information is publicly available and is specified by the regulations
  • We may disclose de-identified information for approved research or statistics projects, subject to ethics oversight and confidentiality commitments

4. When and With Whom Do We Share Your Personal Information?

In Short: We share information with specific named third-party service providers as described below.

Vendors, Consultants, and Other Third-Party Service Providers. We share your data with third-party vendors, service providers, contractors, or agents ("third parties") who perform services for us or on our behalf and require access to such information to do that work. We have contracts in place with our third parties, which are designed to help safeguard your personal information. This means that they cannot do anything with your personal information unless we have instructed them to do it. They will also not share your personal information with any organization apart from us. They also commit to protect the data they hold on our behalf and to retain it for the period we instruct.

The specific third-party service providers we share data with are:

  • OpenAI (AI Platform): Processes chatbot training content for vector embedding generation and generates AI chatbot responses. Receives: business training content text, visitor chat messages, conversation history, and business context for response generation.
  • Firecrawl (Web Crawling Service, firecrawl.dev): Crawls business website URLs provided by account holders to extract content for chatbot training. Receives: the website URL provided by the business owner.
  • Google Cloud Vision (OCR Service): Extracts text from uploaded document images for chatbot training. Receives: image data from uploaded training documents.
  • Supabase (Cloud Database & Authentication): Hosts our database, file storage, user authentication, and server-side functions. Stores: all application data including account information, chat history, and training content.
  • Stripe (Payment Processor): Processes subscription payments. Receives: payment information and billing address. Stripe handles and stores all payment card details.
  • Netlify (Website Hosting): Hosts our front-end web application.
  • Google Analytics (GA4) (Analytics): Collects aggregate usage statistics on our marketing website and business dashboard only. Does not run on chatbot widget pages embedded on third-party websites.

We also may need to share your personal information in the following situations:

  • Business Transfers. We may share or transfer your information in connection with, or during negotiations of, any merger, sale of company assets, financing, or acquisition of all or a portion of our business to another company.

5. Do We Use Cookies and Other Storage Technologies?

In Short: We use minimal cookies and browser storage for essential functionality and basic analytics.

Cookies

We use one functional cookie on our website:

  • sidebar:state — stores your sidebar open/closed preference for 7 days. This is a first-party, functional cookie that does not track you or collect personal information.

Google Analytics (GA4), which runs only on our marketing website and dashboard (not on chatbot widgets), may set its own cookies to collect aggregate usage statistics. For details on Google Analytics cookies, see Google's Privacy & Terms page.

Browser storage (localStorage and sessionStorage)

We use browser storage technologies for essential functionality:

  • localStorage: Stores your authentication session (managed by Supabase), UI preferences (such as theme and sidebar state), and chatbot widget session tokens for returning visitors.
  • sessionStorage: Stores temporary state such as page reload flags.

These browser storage mechanisms are not cookies and cannot be read by third-party websites. They are used solely for functional purposes.

What we do NOT use

We do not use: web beacons, tracking pixels, advertising cookies, third-party advertising trackers, remarketing tools, targeted advertising, or any technology designed to track your browsing activity across websites. We do not serve personalized advertisements.

Google Analytics

We use Google Analytics (GA4) to collect aggregate, non-personally-identifiable usage statistics on our marketing website and business dashboard. Google Analytics is NOT loaded on chatbot widget pages embedded on third-party websites, meaning widget visitors are not tracked by Google Analytics.

To opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics on our website, you can install the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on. For more information on Google's privacy practices, visit the Google Privacy & Terms page.

6. Do We Offer Artificial Intelligence-Based Products?

In Short: We offer products, features, or tools powered by artificial intelligence, machine learning, or similar technologies.

As part of our Services, we offer products, features, or tools powered by artificial intelligence, machine learning, or similar technologies (collectively, "AI Products"). These tools are designed to enhance your experience and provide you with innovative solutions. The terms in this Privacy Notice govern your use of the AI Products within our Services.

AI service providers and data flows

We use the following third-party AI service providers:

  • OpenAI: Our primary AI provider. We send the following data to OpenAI:
    • Training content text (documents, website content, FAQs) for vector embedding generation using the text-embedding-3-small model
    • Visitor chat messages, conversation history, and business context (business profile, contact information) for AI response generation
    • Crawled website content for business information extraction
  • Firecrawl (firecrawl.dev): Receives website URLs provided by business owners and returns the crawled content in text format for chatbot training.
  • Google Cloud Vision: Receives image data from uploaded training documents and returns extracted text via optical character recognition (OCR).

You must not use the AI Products in any way that violates the terms or policies of any AI Service Provider.

Our AI Products

Our AI Products are designed for the following functions:

  • AI-powered chatbot responses for customer inquiries
  • Semantic search and retrieval of relevant training content
  • AI-generated business insights and analytics
  • Automated text extraction from documents and images

How We Process Your Data Using AI

All personal information processed using our AI Products is handled in line with our Privacy Notice and our agreements with third-party providers. Training content and chat messages are transmitted securely to AI service providers via encrypted connections. We do not use your data to train third-party AI models; data is processed only to generate responses and embeddings for your specific chatbot.

7. How Do We Handle Google Sign-In?

In Short: If you choose to register or log in to our Services using your Google account, we receive limited profile information from Google.

Our Services offer you the ability to register and log in using your Google account. If you choose to do this, we will receive the following profile information from Google: your name, email address, and profile picture. We do not receive your Google password, contacts list, friends list, or any other Google account data beyond basic profile information.

We will use the information we receive only for the purposes described in this Privacy Notice: specifically, to create and manage your account on our Services. Please note that we do not control, and are not responsible for, other uses of your personal information by Google. We recommend that you review Google's Privacy Policy to understand how they collect, use, and share your personal information.

8. How Long Do We Keep Your Information?

In Short: We keep your information for as long as necessary to fulfill the purposes outlined in this Privacy Notice unless otherwise required by law.

We will only keep your personal information for as long as it is necessary for the purposes set out in this Privacy Notice, unless a longer retention period is required or permitted by law (such as tax, accounting, or other legal requirements).

Specifically:

  • Account data: Retained for the duration of your account. Upon account deletion, all associated data (business profiles, training content, vector embeddings, chat history, uploaded files) is permanently deleted.
  • Chat session data: Chat messages and session records are retained until you manually delete them through your dashboard or until you delete your account. There is no automatic expiration of chat history.
  • Widget session tokens: Authentication tokens for chatbot widget sessions expire automatically after 24 hours.
  • System logs: Error and diagnostic logs are retained for operational purposes to maintain service quality and investigate issues.

When you delete your account, we permanently remove your data from our active databases. Some information may temporarily persist in backup archives, in which case we will securely store and isolate it from further processing until deletion from backups is complete.

9. How Do We Keep Your Information Safe?

In Short: We aim to protect your personal information through a system of organizational and technical security measures.

We have implemented appropriate and reasonable technical and organizational security measures designed to protect the security of any personal information we process. These include: row-level security policies ensuring business owners can only access their own data, opaque session tokens (cryptographically hashed, not stored in plaintext) for widget authentication, server-side rate limiting to prevent abuse, and encrypted connections for all data transmissions to third-party service providers.

However, despite our safeguards and efforts to secure your information, no electronic transmission over the Internet or information storage technology can be guaranteed to be 100% secure, so we cannot promise or guarantee that hackers, cybercriminals, or other unauthorized third parties will not be able to defeat our security and improperly collect, access, steal, or modify your information. Although we will do our best to protect your personal information, transmission of personal information to and from our Services is at your own risk. You should only access the Services within a secure environment.

10. Do We Collect Information from Minors?

In Short: We do not knowingly collect data from or market to children under 18 years of age or the equivalent age as specified by law in your jurisdiction.

We do not knowingly collect, solicit data from, or market to children under 18 years of age or the equivalent age as specified by law in your jurisdiction, nor do we knowingly sell such personal information. By using the Services, you represent that you are at least 18 or the equivalent age as specified by law in your jurisdiction or that you are the parent or guardian of such a minor and consent to such minor dependent's use of the Services. If we learn that personal information from users less than 18 years of age or the equivalent age as specified by law in your jurisdiction has been collected, we will deactivate the account and take reasonable measures to promptly delete such data from our records. If you become aware of any data we may have collected from children under age 18 or the equivalent age as specified by law in your jurisdiction, please contact us at support@catchwhen.com.

11. What Are Your Privacy Rights?

In Short: Depending on your state of residence in the US or in some regions, such as the European Economic Area (EEA), United Kingdom (UK), Switzerland, and Canada, you have rights that allow you greater access to and control over your personal information. You may review, change, or terminate your account at any time, depending on your country, province, or state of residence.

In some regions (like the EEA, UK, Switzerland, and Canada), you have certain rights under applicable data protection laws. These may include the right (i) to request access and obtain a copy of your personal information, (ii) to request rectification or erasure; (iii) to restrict the processing of your personal information; (iv) if applicable, to data portability; and (v) not to be subject to automated decision-making. If a decision that produces legal or similarly significant effects is made solely by automated means, we will inform you, explain the main factors, and offer a simple way to request human review. In certain circumstances, you may also have the right to object to the processing of your personal information. You can make such a request by contacting us by using the contact details provided in the section "How Can You Contact Us About This Notice?" below.

We will consider and act upon any request in accordance with applicable data protection laws.

If you are located in the EEA or UK and you believe we are unlawfully processing your personal information, you also have the right to complain to your Member State data protection authority or UK data protection authority.

If you are located in Switzerland, you may contact the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner.

Withdrawing your consent: If we are relying on your consent to process your personal information, which may be express and/or implied consent depending on the applicable law, you have the right to withdraw your consent at any time. You can withdraw your consent at any time by contacting us by using the contact details provided in the section "How Can You Contact Us About This Notice?" below.

However, please note that this will not affect the lawfulness of the processing before its withdrawal nor, when applicable law allows, will it affect the processing of your personal information conducted in reliance on lawful processing grounds other than consent.

Opting out of marketing and promotional communications: You can unsubscribe from our marketing and promotional communications at any time by clicking on the unsubscribe link in the emails that we send, or by contacting us using the details provided in the section "How Can You Contact Us About This Notice?" below. You will then be removed from the marketing lists. However, we may still communicate with you — for example, to send you service-related messages that are necessary for the administration and use of your account, to respond to service requests, or for other non-marketing purposes.

Account Information

If you would at any time like to review or change the information in your account or terminate your account, you can:

  • Log in to your account settings and update your user account.

Upon your request to terminate your account, we will deactivate or delete your account and information from our active databases. However, we may retain some information in our files to prevent fraud, troubleshoot problems, assist with any investigations, enforce our legal terms and/or comply with applicable legal requirements.

Cookies and browser storage: Our website uses one functional cookie (sidebar:state) which can be blocked without affecting core functionality. Google Analytics cookies can be blocked using the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on. Browser localStorage and sessionStorage data can be cleared through your browser settings.

If you have questions or comments about your privacy rights, you may email us at support@catchwhen.com.

12. Controls for Do-Not-Track Features

We do not perform behavioral tracking, ad targeting, or cross-site tracking. Our website uses Google Analytics (GA4) solely for aggregate usage statistics on our marketing website and dashboard. Chatbot widget pages embedded on third-party websites do not load any analytics or tracking tools.

Most web browsers and some mobile operating systems include a Do-Not-Track ("DNT") feature or setting. At this stage, no uniform technology standard for recognizing and implementing DNT signals has been finalized. As such, we do not currently respond to DNT browser signals or any other mechanism that automatically communicates your choice not to be tracked online. If a standard for online tracking is adopted that we must follow in the future, we will inform you about that practice in a revised version of this Privacy Notice.

13. Do United States Residents Have Specific Privacy Rights?

In Short: If you are a resident of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, or Virginia, you may have the right to request access to and receive details about the personal information we maintain about you and how we have processed it, correct inaccuracies, get a copy of, or delete your personal information. You may also have the right to withdraw your consent to our processing of your personal information. These rights may be limited in some circumstances by applicable law.

Categories of Personal Information We Collect

We have not sold or shared any personal information to third parties for a business or commercial purpose in the preceding twelve (12) months.

Your Rights

You have rights under certain US state data protection laws. However, these rights are not absolute, and in certain cases, we may decline your request as permitted by law. These rights include:

  • Right to know whether or not we are processing your personal data
  • Right to access your personal data
  • Right to correct inaccuracies in your personal data
  • Right to request the deletion of your personal data
  • Right to obtain a copy of the personal data you previously shared with us
  • Right to non-discrimination for exercising your rights
  • Right to opt out of the processing of your personal data if it is used for targeted advertising (or sharing as defined under California's privacy law), the sale of personal data, or profiling in furtherance of decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects ("profiling")

How to Exercise Your Rights

To exercise these rights, you can contact us by emailing us at support@catchwhen.com, or by referring to the contact details at the bottom of this document.

Request Verification

Upon receiving your request, we will need to verify your identity to determine you are the same person about whom we have the information in our system. We will only use personal information provided in your request to verify your identity or authority to make the request. However, if we cannot verify your identity from the information already maintained by us, we may request that you provide additional information for the purposes of verifying your identity and for security or fraud-prevention purposes.

If you submit the request through an authorized agent, we may need to collect additional information to verify your identity before processing your request and the agent will need to provide a written and signed permission from you to submit such request on your behalf.

Appeals

Under certain US state data protection laws, if we decline to take action regarding your request, you may appeal our decision by emailing us at support@catchwhen.com. We will inform you in writing of any action taken or not taken in response to the appeal, including a written explanation of the reasons for the decisions. If your appeal is denied, you may submit a complaint to your state attorney general.

California "Shine The Light" Law

California Civil Code Section 1798.83, also known as the "Shine The Light" law, permits our users who are California residents to request and obtain from us, once a year and free of charge, information about categories of personal information (if any) we disclosed to third parties for direct marketing purposes and the names and addresses of all third parties with which we shared personal information in the immediately preceding calendar year. If you are a California resident and would like to make such a request, please submit your request in writing to us by using the contact details provided in the section "How Can You Contact Us About This Notice?"

14. Do We Make Updates to This Notice?

In Short: Yes, we will update this notice as necessary to stay compliant with relevant laws.

We may update this Privacy Notice from time to time. The updated version will be indicated by an updated "Revised" date at the top of this Privacy Notice. If we make material changes to this Privacy Notice, we may notify you either by prominently posting a notice of such changes or by directly sending you a notification. We encourage you to review this Privacy Notice frequently to be informed of how we are protecting your information.

15. How Can You Contact Us About This Notice?

If you have questions or comments about this notice, you may email us at support@catchwhen.com or contact us by post at:

Catchwhen

1209 Thurlow St

Vancouver, British Columbia V6E 1X4

Canada

16. How Can You Review, Update, or Delete the Data We Collect from You?

Based on the applicable laws of your country or state of residence in the US, you may have the right to request access to the personal information we collect from you, details about how we have processed it, correct inaccuracies, or delete your personal information. You may also have the right to withdraw your consent to our processing of your personal information. These rights may be limited in some circumstances by applicable law. To request to review, update, or delete your personal information, please contact us at support@catchwhen.com.