Privacy policy

1. Who we are

VoltaServices Limited runs VoltaAI and is the controller of the personal data described in this policy. In this policy, "we" and "us" mean VoltaServices Limited, and "you" means anyone who uses VoltaAI.

• Company: VoltaServices Limited, registered in England and Wales, company number 16178827.
• Registered office: Elizabeth Suite, 3rd Floor, 207 Regent Street, London, W1B 3HH.
• Registration with the Information Commission: ZB874097.
• Data protection officer: Emre Dalar.
• Privacy and data rights contact: privacy@voltaservices.co.uk.

This policy covers the VoltaAI website, the web chat, our apps and our API. VoltaAI is aimed at users in the UK. If you use it from another country, this policy still describes what we do with your data.

If you use our API to send us other people's personal data, contact us first. We offer a data processing agreement on request.

2. What we collect

Most of the personal data we hold comes from you. Some comes from other organisations, as listed under "Data we receive from others" below.

• Account details: your email address, first name and surname, and your password, which we store only as a hash. We also store the links and codes we send you to verify your email address, reset your password or sign in, with their expiry times.
• Terms acceptance: when you register on our website, the version of our terms you accepted and the time you accepted them.
• Sign-in security: the multi-factor authentication methods you turn on. For an authenticator app, we store its secret. For email codes, we store the current code. For SMS codes, we store your phone number and our SMS provider's reference for the request.
• Plan and billing: your plan, subscription status, wallet balance and transactions, promotion codes you redeem, and the references that payment providers and Google Play give us (see below).
• Account status: your account settings, and whether paid features on your account are suspended.
• Billing portal: if your account is managed through the VoltaServices billing portal, which we also run, the account and key details the portal sends when it creates or updates your account and API keys.
• Chats: your conversations (title, model and summary), your messages and the replies (content and any image links), earlier versions of messages you edit, and conversation branches.
• Memory: memory search copies, which are the search data we make from your messages: numerical representations of them (called embeddings), each with a fingerprint of the message text. We keep them in our database, and in a search index where enabled. Depending on how the service is configured, memory also keeps a store of facts built from your saved messages, together with the text of those messages. Our AI governance page explains how memory works.
• Files: images you generate and documents you upload.
• Tool runs: when a model uses a tool for you, such as web search, the inputs it gave the tool, with any field named like a secret removed, and up to 60,000 characters of the tool's output.
• Usage records: for each request you make through the web chat, our apps or the API, the key used, the time, the endpoint, the result status, the model, the number of tokens in and out, and the cost. These records do not contain message content. We also count the messages and images you use each day.
• Preferences: your tool and skill preferences, and whether memory is switched on.
• Support: support tickets and replies, including replies you send by email, and live-chat sessions and messages.
• Student verification: if you verify as a student, your institution, country and affiliations, and an identifier for you from your university login.
• Feedback: if you use the feedback form, the category you choose, your email address and your message.
• Emails we send you: a log of each email, with the recipient, the subject and the first 500 characters of the body. We remove one-time codes, and the security tokens in links, from the log. The links themselves are not removed.
• Technical data: our server's access log records the IP address of each request. Our application logs can also contain your email address, your phone number, web search queries, conversation titles and extracts from conversation summaries. When you use an API key, we store the IP address it was used from in our database, with its approximate location (country, region and city) and network provider, to protect your account and our service. We look up the location on our own servers using a database file, so no other company receives your IP address for this. This includes the keys our mobile and desktop apps create when you sign in, and we also record the IP address used to create, edit or revoke a key. To limit misuse of the feedback form, we count submissions from each IP address for 2 hours. To limit sign-in emails, we keep counters linked to your email address.
• Cookies and browser storage: see our cookies page.

Data we receive from others.

• Payment providers: Stripe and GoCardless give us customer and payment references.
• Google Play: for purchases in our mobile app, the order reference, the purchase token and your country.
• Student verification: if you verify as a student through your university login, StudID gives us your institution, your affiliation and a pseudonymous identifier.

What you must give us. To register, you need to give us your email address, first name, surname and a password. A phone number is needed only if you choose SMS codes. Student details are needed only for student verification. Without the required details we cannot create your account.

Your messages can contain anything you choose to write, including sensitive information such as details of your health or beliefs. Memory can store that information and use it in later chats. You can switch memory off, and list and delete your memories, in your profile.

3. How we use it and why

The table shows what we use personal data for and the lawful basis we rely on under UK data protection law.

We do not rely on your consent for any processing at present. If we ask for your consent in future, you will be able to withdraw it at any time.

Where we rely on legitimate interests, you have the right to object. See Your data rights.

4. Who receives it

The recipients are:

• AI model providers: providers in the EU and the USA, and an AI model router in the USA for some free models, receive the content needed to answer each request. An embeddings provider receives the text of your messages to make memory search copies. Our AI governance page explains what they receive.
• Hosting and storage: your account, chats and memory are stored on our own servers in the UK. Hetzner hosts our mail server and our search server in Germany. Wasabi stores images and documents in the UK.
• Payments: Stripe for card payments, GoCardless for Direct Debit and Google Play billing for purchases in our mobile app. You enter card and bank details on Stripe's and GoCardless's own pages, not on ours.
• SMS: Vonage receives your phone number and the code when we send you an SMS sign-in code.
• Support email: Postmark receives the replies you send by email to support tickets.
• Student verification: StudID handles student verification through your university login.
• Web search: when a model searches the web for you, an AI model provider writes the search queries from your request, and our own search server, hosted by Hetzner in Germany, sends them to public web search engines, some of them in the USA. The search engines receive the query text, but not your account details or your IP address.
• Our administrators: staff with administrator access can view account records, conversation content and images through our admin tools.

Emails we send you, such as verification and sign-in emails with their codes and links, go through our own mail server, hosted by Hetzner in Germany. We do not use an email sending service.

Our sub-processors page lists each recipient, with what it receives and where. The named list of AI providers is available on request from privacy@voltaservices.co.uk, or under a data processing agreement.

5. International transfers

Your account, chats and memory are stored on our own servers in the UK, and our file storage is also in the UK, so storing them involves no international transfer. Emails we send you go through our mail server, and web search queries through our search server, both hosted by Hetzner in Germany. Some recipients are in other countries, mainly the USA. The UK recognises the EU and EEA as giving adequate protection, so transfers there, including to our mail and search servers in Germany, need no further safeguard.

Where a US recipient is certified to the UK-US data bridge, we rely on that. Where a recipient's data processing terms include the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or the UK Addendum, we rely on those. Our international transfers page gives the position for each route.

For our AI model provider in the USA, a safeguard is being put in place. We have asked this provider to sign a data processing agreement that includes the UK International Data Transfer Addendum. Until it is signed, transfers on this route are not covered by a UK transfer safeguard. Web search queries go from our search server in Germany to public web search engines, some of them in the USA. The search engines receive only the query text.

You can ask for a copy of the transfer safeguards we rely on. See getting a copy of the safeguards.

6. How long we keep it

Where the table gives no period, we do not delete the data automatically. It stays until you delete it, we delete it, or your account is deleted.

Deleting a conversation removes its messages and the memory search copies made from them. Facts that memory has already drawn from it stay until you delete them in your profile.

When an account is deleted, its API keys, conversations, messages, the memory search copies in our database, saved image records, subscription, wallet, transactions, daily counts, support tickets and live chat are deleted with it. Usage records, tool runs and support ticket messages are kept without a link to the account. Stored files are removed by the 30-day deletion. Stored facts, and memory search copies held in a search index where enabled, are not removed automatically: you can delete them in your profile first, or ask us to remove them as part of your request. Payment providers keep their own records under their own policies.

Our sub-processors page shows how long each provider keeps data.

7. Your rights

UK data protection law gives you rights to access your personal data, to have it corrected or erased, to restrict how we use it, to receive it in a portable form and to object to how we use it, including to memory. You also have rights about automated decisions.

You can do some of this yourself:

• change your account details in your profile;
• export any conversation as JSON, Markdown or PDF;
• switch memory off for your chats from then on, with the memory switch in your profile;
• list your memories in your profile and delete them one at a time or all at once.

Account deletion and full data export are handled by request through privacy@voltaservices.co.uk while self-service tools are built.

We reply to requests within one month. If a request is complex, or you make several, we can extend this by up to two further months, and we will tell you within the first month if we do. Your data rights explains each right and how to use it.

8. Automated decisions

Some decisions about your use of VoltaAI are made automatically:

• Plan limits: each plan has daily limits. The Free plan allows 100 messages and 10 images a day in total.
• Rate limits: each API key has a rate limit, by default 60 requests a minute and 5,000 a day.
• Wallet checks: a pay-as-you-go API request is refused if your wallet balance is too low.
• Payment changes: when a card subscription ends, or a Direct Debit subscription is cancelled, your account moves to the Free plan. If a card payment fails, we mark the subscription as past due.
• Suspension through the billing portal: if the VoltaServices billing portal suspends your account, paid features stop working.
• Student discount: the discount applies only if your university login shows you as a student.
• Sign-in codes: we send no more than 3 email sign-in codes to an address in 10 minutes.
• Prompt-injection filter: your messages that match patterns used in prompt-injection attacks are left out of the conversation history we send to the model. We do not tell you when this happens.

We do not consider that any of these decisions has a legal or similarly significant effect on you. The closest are the move to the Free plan when a subscription ends and the suspension of paid features. For any of these decisions, you can write to privacy@voltaservices.co.uk to ask for information about it, give us your view, ask for a person to review it and contest it.

9. Children

You must be 16 or over to use VoltaAI. We do not verify age.

If you believe a child under 16 has given us personal data, contact privacy@voltaservices.co.uk so that we can delete it.

10. Complaints

If you are unhappy with how we handle your personal data, please complain to us first at privacy@voltaservices.co.uk. We will acknowledge your complaint within 30 days of receiving it, investigate it, keep you informed and tell you the outcome.

You also have the right to complain to the Information Commission, the UK's data protection regulator, at ico.org.uk. The Commission will usually expect you to have complained to us first.

If you live in the EU or EEA, you may also be able to complain to the data protection authority in your country.

11. Changes to this policy

We update this policy when the way we handle personal data changes, and we change the date at the top. If a change affects you significantly, we will tell you by email or with a notice on the site before it takes effect.