Privacy Policy

Connecto is a platform that lets businesses automate customer conversations, orders, and operations over WhatsApp and Telegram. Connecto is operated by CONNECTO SERVICES, a business name registered in Nigeria (CAC BN 9873937), located at 85 Obiagu Road, Enugu, Enugu State, Nigeria. You can reach us at connectohq@gmail.com.

Two different groups of people interact with Connecto, and this policy covers both:

• Business owners — people who sign up for a Connecto account to run their business on the platform.
• Customers — people who message a business through WhatsApp or Telegram, where that business happens to use Connecto to handle the conversation.

From business owners, when you sign up and use Connecto:

• Account details — your name, email address, and a hashed (encrypted) version of your password. We never store your password in plain text.
• Business details — your business name, description, and settings.
• Your product or service catalog, including prices and descriptions.
• Payment or bank details you choose to display to your customers so they can pay you (for example, an account number shown at checkout).

From customers, when they message a business that uses Connecto:

• Their phone number and WhatsApp or Telegram profile name.
• The content of messages they send to the business.
• Orders they place, and any payment amounts they report as paid.

When a customer messages a business on Connecto, that business is the one responsible for that customer's data — deciding what to sell, how to handle orders, and how to respond. Connecto acts on the business's behalf to process that data: routing messages, managing the order flow, and showing conversations in the business's dashboard. In privacy terms, the business is the data controller for its customer conversations, and Connecto is the data processor acting on the business's instructions.

We only use the information above to provide and operate Connecto for the specific business it belongs to. That includes:

• Routing WhatsApp and Telegram messages between a business and its customers.
• Running order flows — taking orders, tracking their status, and recording payments reported by customers.
• Sending notifications related to a business's account or its orders.
• Powering the business's dashboard and analytics, so an owner can see their own orders, customers, and performance.

We do not use this information to advertise to customers, sell it, or share it with other businesses on the platform.

Connecto uses AI to help automate conversations — for example, to draft replies or help process an order. Here is exactly how we handle data in connection with AI:

• Message content is used only to serve the specific business it belongs to — for example, to generate a reply for that business or move one of its orders forward.
• We do not use WhatsApp message data — including anonymised, aggregated, or otherwise derived versions of it — to train or improve AI models that are shared across different businesses on Connecto.
• A business's own message data may be used to personalise the AI assistant that serves that business, so it responds more accurately for that business's own customers and catalog. This personalisation is for that business's exclusive use — it is never pooled with, or used to improve the assistant for, another business.
• We may separately use general product usage metrics (such as which features are used and how often, or system performance) to improve Connecto as a whole. This usage data does not include the content of any messages.

We share information only where needed to run the service:

• Meta (WhatsApp) and Telegram — to send and receive messages on a business's behalf.
• Hosting providers (Railway and Vercel) — to run and host Connecto's infrastructure.
• AI providers — to generate responses for a business's conversations. These providers are used to serve that business's messages; they are not permitted to use the data to train their own general-purpose models.
• Payment providers, if and when a business connects one, to help process payments.

We do not sell personal information to anyone.

We keep account, business, and order data for as long as a business's Connecto account is active, and for a reasonable period afterward to meet legal, accounting, or dispute-resolution needs. Customer conversation data is kept for as long as reasonably needed to support the order and customer-service history for the business it belongs to, unless deletion is requested as described in Section 10.

We use reasonable technical and organizational measures — including encryption of stored passwords and secure hosting — to protect information against unauthorized access, loss, or misuse. No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

Because we use hosting and service providers located in different countries, information may be transferred to and processed in countries other than your own. Where this happens, we take steps to ensure it receives an appropriate level of protection.

If you are a business owner, you can access, correct, or delete most of your account and business information directly from your Connecto dashboard. If you are a customer who has messaged a business using Connecto, you can request access to, or deletion of, your data by contacting either the business directly or Connecto.

To request access to or deletion of your data, email connectohq@gmail.com. We aim to respond to all requests within a reasonable time.

Data deletion

To request that we delete your data, send an email to connectohq@gmail.com with the phone number, account email, or business name associated with the data, and tell us what you'd like deleted. We will verify the request and delete the associated data from our systems, except where we are required to keep it for legal, accounting, or fraud-prevention purposes.

Connecto is operated from Nigeria and complies with the Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023 in its handling of personal data. If you are located in another country, other data protection laws that apply to you may also give you additional rights; we aim to honor reasonable requests made under those laws as well.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. If we make material changes, we will update the effective date at the top of this page. Continued use of Connecto after a change means you accept the updated policy.

Questions about this Privacy Policy or how we handle data can be sent to connectohq@gmail.com.