Data retention and deletion

What is kept, and for how long

Live conversation state — one hour. The last few turns of a conversation are held in a cache so that follow-up questions make sense, and expire automatically one hour after the last message. Nothing keeps them alive; the expiry is set when they are written.

This is also why a visitor who leaves a chat open overnight and then asks for a human is told the conversation has expired — there is genuinely no transcript left to pass on.

Ratings, with the question and answer they relate to — 12 months. Kept so that you can review which answers failed and we can find retrieval problems. A year covers one full cycle of seasonal questions, so you can compare the same period before and after fixing an article. Each rating is deleted automatically twelve months after it was given.

Handoff records — 30 days from the request. What we filed, where, and what came back. Kept because it is what prevents a duplicate ticket being filed into your helpdesk. The ticket itself lives in your helpdesk under your own retention policy, and deleting our record does not delete your ticket.

Server logs — bounded by volume, not by a fixed period. Each service keeps only its most recent output, and older lines are discarded automatically as new ones arrive; application logs are additionally cleared on every release. In practice that is hours for the busiest components and longer for quiet ones. We keep no long-term log archive.

Logs hold request identifiers and timings. They never contain credentials and never contain a record of visitor conversations. The host's own system log, which records administrative access to the server, is deleted after 30 days.

Your indexed documentation — for the life of your account. It is a copy of what you sent us. It is deleted when your account is closed.

Account and billing records — for the life of the contract, then as long as tax and accounting law requires.

Requesting deletion

A visitor's data. Contact the business whose website you were using; they are the controller and we act on their instruction. If you are unsure who that is, write to dimitar@usekaras.com and we will identify them and pass the request on.

As a Karas customer, on behalf of your customer. Email dimitar@usekaras.com with the email address or session identifier. We will confirm what we hold, delete it, and confirm when it is done. We cannot delete the ticket in your own helpdesk — that is yours to remove.

Your whole account. See Cancelling.

What we cannot delete retroactively

A handoff transcript already delivered to your helpdesk is in your system, not ours. Remove it there.

Question text sent to our answer and search providers is processed transiently by them under the terms described in Subprocessors and where data goes and is not something we can reach into and delete.

Backups

Your indexed documentation is reproducible from the source you sent us. Operational data — ratings and handoff records — is not currently covered by automated backups. We would rather say that plainly than imply a durability guarantee we do not have. See Service reliability.