What we process, why, and our lawful basis under UK GDPR
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This page explains what personal data Handlet processes, why we process it, and the lawful basis for doing so under the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR).
Our goal is to be transparent about how data is used when you use Handlet.
1. Why We Process Personal Data
Handlet processes personal data so we can:
Provide the Handlet service
Allow you to connect and manage communication channels
Classify message intent and confidence
Support AI-assisted social post content generation where enabled
Support AI-assisted message drafts, quote text, complaint-response preparation, summaries, and recommendations where those features are enabled
Provide call-agent features where enabled, including call routing, transcripts, recordings, summaries, and follow-ups
Provide account-specific intelligence and optimisation recommendations
Improve Handlet reliability, safety, and account-specific models, classifiers, and recommendations
Where separately and explicitly authorised, create cross-customer benchmark and insight products subject to anonymisation and release controls
Maintain a secure and reliable platform
Communicate with you about your account
Comply with legal obligations
We do not sell personal data.
We also do not use your messages or your customers' messages to train AI models for unrelated purposes.
We may use derived patterns, outcomes, and quality signals within an account to provide and improve that account's service. Cross-customer learning, benchmarking, partner products, and external examples using customer communication data require separate explicit customer authorisation as described in section 3.6 of our .
AI Assistance: Handlet uses AI for intent recognition and, where enabled, drafts, summaries, quote support, social content and call assistance. AI output can be wrong and should be checked before use. Learn More
Under UK GDPR, organisations must have a lawful basis for processing personal data.
Handlet relies on the following lawful bases depending on the activity.
Contract
Most data processing is necessary to provide the service you signed up for.
Examples include:
Creating and managing your account
Displaying and storing messages
Classifying message intent and confidence
Supporting AI-assisted social post content generation where enabled
Supporting AI-assisted message drafts, quote text, complaint-response preparation, summaries, or recommendations where those features are enabled
Connecting and managing communication channels that you ask us to integrate
Without this processing, the service would not function.
For customer communication data that you bring into Handlet, you are typically the controller and Handlet acts as your processor. In that case, you are responsible for identifying your lawful basis for processing your customers' data, and Handlet processes that data on your instructions under our data processing terms.
Consent
We rely on consent where it is the appropriate lawful basis, including for optional storage, analytics, or marketing where consent is required.
Examples include:
Enabling optional analytics or similar non-essential technologies
Receiving non-essential electronic marketing where consent is required
Authorising Handlet with a third-party provider is a technical permission and can be revoked from your account settings. That provider authorisation does not by itself mean that UK GDPR consent is our lawful basis.
Legitimate Interests
Some processing is necessary to operate a secure and reliable service.
Examples include:
Security monitoring
Fraud prevention
Error logging and diagnostics
Improving reliability and performance
Security, diagnostics, fraud prevention, and proportionate service reliability improvement
We ensure this processing is proportionate and respects user privacy.
Legal Obligations
In some cases we must process data to comply with the law.
Examples include:
Responding to data subject access requests
Complying with regulatory obligations
Maintaining certain records required by law
Keeping records of privacy and data subject requests (for example access or deletion requests) where needed for accountability and compliance
3. Types of Data We Process
Account Information
Examples:
Name
Email address
Login credentials (stored securely)
Purpose:
Account creation
Authentication
Service access
Business Profile Information
Examples:
Business name
Trade or service type
User preferences and settings
Purpose:
Configuring the service
Personalising AI suggestions
Customer Communication Data
When you use Handlet to manage communications, we process the data necessary to provide that service.
Examples:
Customer names
Contact details
Message content
Message timestamps and channel metadata
Call transcripts, recordings, summaries, outcomes, and metadata where call-agent features are enabled
Purpose:
Displaying messages
Drafting AI responses
Managing communication history
Handlet processes this data on your behalf as part of delivering the service.
Job, Payment, and Connected-System Records
Where you connect a business system such as a CRM or job-management tool, Handlet may keep its own durable copy of records from it so your history and reporting survive if that system is slow, offline, disconnected, or has deleted the record under its own retention rules. Handlet also creates job records itself when one of your users confirms a job happened.
Examples:
Job status and its scheduled, completed, or cancelled dates
Service or job type
Job value and currency
Links to the customer record, property, and conversation
Free-text job notes, and typed commercial notes about the customer (general, service, billing, risk, or owner notes)
Provenance — which system the record came from, its identifier there, and whether it was copied from a connected system or asserted by one of your own users
Payments your customers made against a job or quote: amount, currency, date, method, reference, and notes
Purpose:
Keeping a durable job and service history in your workspace
Revenue, repeat-customer, and unpaid-work reporting
Follow-up workflows
Every record is labelled with its origin, so a record copied from a connected system is never shown as if you or your team had confirmed it. Once a copy exists in Handlet, it is retained under Handlet's retention rules and your deletion controls, not the source system's — deleting the record in that system does not delete Handlet's copy. Handlet processes these records on your behalf as processor; you remain responsible for your lawful basis and for the notice you give your own customers.
Acquisition, Advertising, and Search Data
Where you enable lead-source measurement or connect an advertising, search, or analytics platform with your own account, Handlet processes data about how an enquiry reached you.
Examples:
Advertising click identifiers passed in the link a visitor followed (gclid, gbraid, wbraid, fbclid)
Campaign, ad group, ad, and creative identifiers, and the advertising account they belong to
Landing page host and path, and referrer host — full query strings are not stored
Consent state: granted, denied, not required, or unknown
Attribution status, lookback expiry, time zone, and capture channel
Google Ads performance metrics, Google Search Console top queries and pages, and Google Analytics 4 aggregated report rows from platforms you connect
Purpose:
Showing you which channel produced each enquiry
Measuring marketing cost and return
Uploading offline conversions back to your own Google Ads account, where you enable it
These identifiers are read server-side from the link the visitor followed. Handlet sets no advertising cookie on your website or in Handlet and builds no cross-site identity profile. Handlet does not send hashed emails, phone numbers, names, or addresses to advertising platforms. Data Handlet obtains from Google APIs, and anything derived from it, is used only to provide or improve features in your own workspace — never for advertising, never for cross-customer benchmarks, and never to train generalised AI models.
You are the controller for measurement on your own website and in your own platform accounts, and are responsible for the consent and notice required there. Handlet records the consent state it is given; where it is unknown, that is reported as unknown rather than assumed to be consent.
Intelligence and Benchmarking Data
Examples:
response speed
follow-up timing
quote value and outcome
booking, cancellation and repeat-customer signals
lead source, channel, broad area, service type and funnel stage
objection, sentiment, intent and persuasion-pattern labels
transformed, paraphrased, summarised, or synthetic message-pattern examples
Purpose:
providing account-specific intelligence and recommendations;
improving account-specific models, classifiers, and automation defaults under customer instructions; and
where separately authorised, creating cross-customer benchmarks, reports, dashboards, APIs, and insight products subject to anonymisation and release controls.
Handlet does not sell raw messages, raw call recordings or transcripts, customer contact details, CRM records, identifiable business profiles, identifiable end-customer profiles, account-level behavioural profiles, or pseudonymised datasets presented as anonymous data.
Technical and Usage Data
Examples:
IP address
Device type
Log data
Feature usage statistics
Purpose:
Security monitoring
Service reliability
Diagnosing technical issues
4. Data Retention
We retain personal data only for as long as necessary to provide the service and comply with legal obligations.
Current retention criteria are:
Data category
Typical retention
Account and workspace data
While the account is active, then deleted or anonymised after account deletion unless retention is required for legal, security, tax, accounting, or dispute purposes.
Customer messages, conversations, drafts, attachments, quotes, and related message metadata
While the workspace uses the service or until deletion is requested and completed, subject to backup, audit, legal, security, and provider retention limits.
Call recordings
Controlled by the workspace recording policy where call-agent features are enabled. The default recording retention period is 90 days unless the workspace configures another valid period, keeps a specific recording, or disables recording.
Call transcripts, call summaries, call outcomes, and related call metadata
Controlled by the workspace recording policy where call-agent features are enabled. The default transcript retention period is 24 months (730 days) unless the workspace configures another valid period or keeps a specific transcript. After the retention period, Handlet automatically redacts transcript text and related call insights from primary storage; recording audio may already have been removed under the separate recording retention period above. Subject to legal, security, backup, and provider retention limits.
Technical, diagnostic, and security logs
Retained for limited operational and security periods. Security or incident records may be retained longer where needed to investigate abuse, fraud, reliability, or legal claims.
CRM connection secrets
Deleted immediately when credentials are revoked or the connection is removed.
CRM import rows and external reference data
Typically retained for 30 days after relevant cleanup triggers.
CRM matching and participant index metadata
Typically retained for 90 days after relevant cleanup triggers.
CRM connection and mapping metadata
Typically retained for up to 365 days after relevant cleanup triggers.
CRM audit and manual-resolution records
Typically retained for up to 730 days for accountability and dispute handling.
Job records in your workspace — copied from a connected system or confirmed by your own users — including status, dates, service type, value, and notes
Life of the workspace, or until the workspace or the linked customer profile is deleted, or until you request deletion. Not governed by the source system's retention rules; deleting the record there does not delete Handlet's copy.
Payments your customers made against a job or quote
Life of the workspace or until you request deletion, and where required for your tax, accounting, legal, and dispute purposes. Deleting a conversation drops the link to it but preserves the financial record.
Until the enquiry's attribution lookback window expires, or until erasure is requested — whichever is first. On erasure the identifiers are removed and the touchpoint is marked erased.
Landing-page handoff tokens
Only a hashed form is stored; expires and is emptied on use or expiry.
Non-identifying campaign, ad, creative, and UTM labels, and advertising performance metrics
While the platform connection exists; purged on disconnect or workspace deletion.
Google Search Console snapshot
Short-lived cache overwritten approximately hourly, capped at 10 queries and 10 pages; deleted when the connection or website is removed.
Google Analytics 4 report cache
Bounded cache per connection and period; overwritten on refresh and deleted when the connection is removed.
Advertising, search, and analytics connection credentials
Deleted immediately when the connection is revoked or removed.
Billing, invoice, dispute, tax, and accounting records
Retained where required for tax, accounting, legal, and dispute purposes.
Data subject request, privacy, security, and audit records
Retained as needed for accountability, legal claims, security, and compliance.
When an account is deleted, we delete or anonymise personal data in accordance with our retention policies.
The UK GDPR deletion flow deletes the workspace message corpus from primary stores, including canonical messages and conversations, outbound drafts, attachment metadata, attachment files in the message-attachments storage area, and derived metadata used by exports, AI, and workflow integrations. Backups and third-party provider systems follow their own retention and deletion cycles. Call recording and transcript retention in primary storage follows the workspace schedule above; infrastructure backups (including Supabase point-in-time recovery and daily backups) may retain copies until those backup windows expire.
For a detailed breakdown of our lawful bases, purposes and data categories (Article 6 UK GDPR), see Lawful basis & data categories.
5. Special Category Data
Handlet does not intentionally collect or process special category personal data (such as health data, racial or ethnic origin, or religious beliefs).
If such information appears within messages sent through connected communication channels, it is processed only as necessary to provide the service.
You should avoid adding special category or criminal offence data to Handlet unless it is genuinely necessary for your business communication and lawful for you to process.
6. Your Rights
Under UK GDPR you have several rights relating to your personal data, including the right to:
Access your personal data
Request correction of inaccurate data
Request deletion of personal data
Object to certain processing
Request data portability
If you would like to exercise any of these rights, please contact us at: