AfterChat is an AI sales assistant that helps businesses answer and qualify WhatsApp enquiries. This policy explains what personal information we process, why, who we share it with, and the rights you have under the Protection of Personal Information Act, 2013 (POPIA).
AfterChat (the "responsible party" for the purposes of POPIA) determines how personal information is processed for the AfterChat service. For information belonging to a business's own customers, that business is the responsible party and AfterChat acts as its operator.
Contact: hello@afterchat.co.za
Privacy / data requests: support@afterchat.co.za
We do not sell personal information, and we do not use customer conversations for advertising.
To generate a reply, the content of a conversation (and relevant product information) is sent to OpenAI's API. Messages are processed to produce the response and are not used by AfterChat to train models. Businesses can configure their own API credentials if they prefer to process under their own agreement with OpenAI.
Some providers (including OpenAI and Meta) process information outside South Africa. Where this happens, we rely on the provider's contractual data-protection commitments and transfer mechanisms recognised under POPIA section 72.
Conversation and lead data is retained for as long as the business's account is active, and then for up to 12 months for backup, dispute-resolution and legal purposes unless a longer period is required by law. Billing records are kept for the period required by tax legislation. A business may request earlier deletion of its customers' data, subject to those obligations.
Under POPIA you may ask us to:
Send requests to support@afterchat.co.za. We may ask you to verify your identity. If you are unhappy with our response you may complain to the Information Regulator of South Africa at inforegulator.org.za.
Data is encrypted in transit, credentials for connected services are encrypted at rest, access is restricted to authorised personnel, and backups are encrypted. No system is perfectly secure; if a breach affects your personal information we will notify you and the Information Regulator as POPIA requires.
The public marketing site does not set advertising or analytics cookies. The admin dashboard and client portal use a session cookie that is required to keep you signed in; blocking it will prevent login.
If this policy changes materially we will update the version and effective date above and, where appropriate, notify account holders by email.