Privacy policy

In one paragraph. The assistant reads only the emails you label for it, writes a draft reply, and leaves it in your drafts. It never sends email and it cannot change your diary. To do that it holds a key to your Google account on our server, and it keeps a short record of each enquiry it handled. It never stores the contents of your emails.

What we access in your Google account, and why

• Gmail — we read only the messages carrying the Assistant/To do label, create draft replies in your account, and move those Assistant labels. We never send email. Being straight about why: Google has no permission that allows writing a draft without also allowing sending, so we cannot tell you the ability is absent. What we can tell you is that there is no send instruction anywhere in our code, a test fails our build if one is ever added, and every draft sits in your drafts until you press send. The same permission technically covers your whole mailbox; what limits us to the labelled messages is our own code, and your activity log lists every thread we touched.
• Google Calendar, read only — we read when you are busy so the reply can offer times that are actually free. We never create, change or delete anything in your diary.
• Gmail filter settings — we create the single filter that puts the Assistant label on your enquiries, so you never have to label one by hand. It only adds that label: it never archives, deletes, marks as read or moves anything. It is the only filter we touch, and closing your account removes it again.
• Your name and email address from Google Sign-In, to identify your account when you log in.

We ask for the narrowest access that does the job. If you withdraw it, the assistant stops immediately.

What we store on our servers

• Your account: the email address you sign in with, your Google account identifier, your name, and the address of the mailbox it works in.
• Your settings: business name, phone number, treatments and prices, opening hours, booking rules and the wording you wrote.
• A key to your Google account, encrypted with Google Cloud KMS. The unencrypted value is never written to disk and never logged.
• For each enquiry handled: the subject line, the sender's first name, which of your treatments matched, how many times were offered, whether it was passed to you, and when. This is what your activity log is built from.
• Billing identifiers from Stripe. We never see or hold your card details — Stripe does.

What we do not store

The body of any email, attachments, your contacts, your customers' email addresses, or the details of anything in your diary. Your dashboard reads those live from your own Google account each time you open it, and nothing is kept afterwards.

Where the wording of an enquiry goes

Most enquiries are worked out on our own server from your price list, and nothing leaves it. When the wording is unusual enough that we cannot be confident what is being asked, the text of that message is sent to Google's Gemini model on Google Cloud Vertex AI, running in our Google Cloud project on paid terms, which means it is not used to train or improve any model. Your activity log marks every enquiry with which of the two happened, so you can always see it.

The wording of an enquiry goes nowhere else, and to no other company.

Who else is involved

Google Cloud hosts the service, in London (europe-west2), and provides the AI on Google's paid terms — which means Google does not use what is sent to it to train its models. The AI itself runs on Google's own infrastructure and is not pinned to London. Stripe takes the payments. That is the entire list. We do not sell anything to anyone, and we do not share your data or your customers' data for advertising.

Ashley Lodge's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs to any other app will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

Your customers' information

The enquiries in your mailbox are your business's data. We handle them on your instructions, to draft your replies, and for nothing else. If one of your customers asks you what happened to their information, everything we hold about that enquiry is the subject line, their first name and the outcome — and you can have it deleted by closing your account.

How long we keep it

For as long as your account is open. Close my account, on your settings page, deletes your settings, your activity log and our key to your Google account, and withdraws that access at Google. Nothing in your Gmail or your diary is changed — the drafts already written stay yours.

Billing records are kept for six years afterwards, because HMRC requires it.

Your rights

You can ask what we hold, have it corrected, have it deleted, or object to how it is used. Email ashley@ashleylodge.uk and you will get an answer within 30 days. If you are not satisfied you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.