Privacy policy

Last updated: 13 November 2026

This policy explains what personal data NextAsk handles, why, who receives it, how long it is kept and what your rights are. It covers our website (including the chat on it), the dashboard, and the chat widget that our customers add to their own websites.

1. Who we are

NextAsk is provided by Ferlabel S.R.L., Via Stelvio, 20, Roma, Italy. VAT number (P.IVA) 01998471005, tax code (C.F.) 08238250586.

For any privacy question or request, write to info@ferlabel.com.

2. Our two roles

Controller. For the people who visit our website, including those who chat with the widget on our website, and for our customers (the people who create an account, called "owners" below), we decide how and why their data is used. This policy is our notice to them.
Processor. When a visitor chats with the widget on an owner's website, that owner is the controller of the chat and of any contact details the visitor leaves in it. We store and process the chat and those details only to provide the service to the owner, on the owner's instructions (see the Terms of service, "Data protection"). If you chatted on an owner's website, the website's owner is the one to ask about your data; we help them answer. Chats on our own website are ours: see "Chats on our website" below.

3. What we collect and why

Your account

What: your name, email address, password (stored only as a secure hash), whether your email is verified, and, if you sign in with Google, your Google account ID.
Why: to create your account, sign you in, send the verification and password-reset emails, and run the service you signed up for.
Legal basis: performance of our contract with you (Article 6(1)(b) GDPR).

The content you add

What: the knowledge you add (pasted text, uploaded PDF, Word, Markdown and text files, and the text taken from them), and your widget settings.
Why: so the chat can answer your visitors from your content.
Legal basis: performance of our contract with you. Please don't add personal data to your knowledge unless you need to and are allowed to.

Chats on your website (we act as processor)

What: each visitor's messages, the bot's replies, the time of each message, a random visitor ID that the widget creates in the visitor's browser, the address of the page where the chat started (without the part after ? or #, which can hold personal data) and the language of the chat window.
Contact details: if the owner turns on contact collection (Pro plan), a visitor can choose to leave their name, email address and, optionally, a phone number and a message, after confirming they have read the owner's privacy policy. The owner is the controller of these details and decides what to do with them; we store them for the owner, email them to the owner, and show them in the owner's dashboard. They are never sent to OpenAI or to our analytics.
Why: to answer the visitor, keep the conversation going, show the conversations and contacts to the owner in the dashboard, and tell the owner about new contacts.
IP address: the visitor's IP address is used to limit how many messages and contact forms can be sent. It is part of rate-limit counters: some expire after a few minutes, the daily one after 24 hours, and all are deleted within 2 days at most. It is not stored with the chat or the contact details.

Chats on our website (we act as controller)

Our own website has a NextAsk chat too, which answers questions about NextAsk. For these chats we are the controller.

What: your messages, the bot's replies, the time of each message, a random visitor ID that the widget creates in your browser, the address of the page where the chat started (without the part after ? or #) and the language of the chat window. We don't ask for your name or email, so please don't write personal details in the chat. Your IP address is used for at most 2 days to limit how many messages can be sent, as for any chat, and is not stored with the chat.
Why: to answer your questions about NextAsk before you sign up. We keep the conversation so the bot can follow it, and we read it in our dashboard to improve the answers.
Legal basis: our legitimate interest in answering the questions of people interested in NextAsk (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR). You can object at any time (see "Your rights").
AI: your question and the last messages of the conversation are sent to OpenAI, as for any chat (see section 4).
How long: we delete these chats automatically 90 days after they start.

Signing in and security

What: a session cookie, and on our server a session record with your IP address and your browser's user agent. IP addresses are also used to limit how many requests can be made in a minute.
Why: to keep you signed in, protect accounts and stop abuse.
Legal basis: performance of our contract and our legitimate interest in keeping the service secure (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR).

Billing

What: payments are handled by Stripe. When you first open Checkout, we send Stripe your name and email to create your customer record. During checkout Stripe collects your billing address, payment card and, for companies, your VAT number. Card details are entered on Stripe's pages and never reach our servers. We keep your Stripe customer ID, your plan and your subscription status, and may keep the card type and its last four digits.
E-invoice: if you ask for an electronic invoice on the Billing page, we store in our database the details you enter: the type (company / professional or private person), the name or company name, the tax code, the VAT number, the address, and the SDI code or PEC address. We use them only to issue the electronic invoice for your payments: we send them by email to our administration, which issues the invoice with our electronic invoicing system and sends it to the Italian tax agency's exchange system (Sistema di Interscambio, SdI). You can change or remove them at any time. The copy in our database is deleted with your account; the details already sent to our administration by email, those held in our electronic invoicing system and those on invoices already issued are kept for as long as tax law requires.
Why: to charge for the Pro plan, calculate VAT, issue invoices and keep the accounting records the law requires.
Legal basis: performance of our contract, and our legal obligations under tax and accounting law (Article 6(1)(c) GDPR).

Product analytics in your browser (only with your consent)

What: if you click "Accept" in the cookie banner, our website and dashboard load PostHog, which records pseudonymous usage events: pages viewed, clicks (without the text or attributes of what you clicked), errors in the page, and session recordings of the page in which every input field is masked and the content of chats and documents is hidden. Once you sign in, these events are linked to your account's internal ID, never to your email or name. PostHog is set to discard your IP address, so it isn't stored.
Why: to see which parts of NextAsk are used, where people get stuck, and to fix errors.
Legal basis: your consent (Article 6(1)(a) GDPR). Nothing is loaded before you accept. You can withdraw your consent at any time with "Cookie settings" in the footer of our website or on your Account page; analytics stops at once.

Product analytics on our server (no cookies)

What: our server sends PostHog a small set of events linked to your account's internal ID: account created, chatbot created, knowledge added, first chat, upgrade to Pro, a message blocked by our protections (with the reason), a question with no close match in your knowledge (with the match score), a contact left in your chat (with the chatbot ID only), one usage record for each AI answer (model, tokens, cost, response time, chatbot ID and conversation ID), and server errors. The events we define carry none of message text, document titles, your email, your name, a visitor's ID or an IP address. Server error reports carry the type of error, its message and where in our code it happened, without function arguments or source code: database and Stripe error messages are reduced to an error code, and emails and IP addresses are removed from the other messages. None of these events sets a cookie in your browser.
Why: to count sign-ups and upgrades, measure the cost and quality of AI answers, and find errors.
Legal basis: our legitimate interest in running and improving the service (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR). You can object to it at any time (see "Your rights").

Emails

We send emails only for your account: verification and password-reset messages; service emails when your chatbot reaches 80% or 100% of its monthly messages or when your extra messages run out (you can't turn these off); a weekly summary of your chats (on by default; you can turn it off on your Account page or with the link in the email); and, if you turn on contact collection, an email for each new contact (to your account's email, or to another address once you confirm it through the link we send there; beyond 20 contacts in an hour, the others arrive together in one email at the end of that hour) and that confirmation email. To write these emails in your language, we keep the language of your account's last visit. They go out through our hosting provider's mail server.

Server logs

Our server writes an error log to investigate problems. Log files are deleted after 14 days.

4. AI answers

The chat answers are written by an AI model (OpenAI), only from the owner's knowledge. Every visitor question, together with the visitor's previous message, is sent to OpenAI to search the owner's knowledge (OpenAI turns the text into a search vector). Only when part of the knowledge matches closely enough is the answering model called, with the instructions the owner wrote for the bot, the matching passages and the last messages of the conversation; otherwise the widget answers that it doesn't know, without calling it. The widget tells visitors that its answers are generated by AI and may be inaccurate. The answers have no legal or similarly significant effect on anyone; there is no automated decision-making in the sense of Article 22 GDPR.

5. Who receives the data

We use these providers. Each one receives only what it needs for its task.

Provider	What it does	What it receives
Our hosting provider, with servers in Germany (EU)	Runs our server, database, file storage and mail server	Everything we store: accounts, content, chats, contact details, sessions, logs and outgoing emails
OpenAI	Writes the chat answers and turns text into search vectors	The text of your knowledge (to make it searchable); every visitor question with the visitor's previous message (to search your knowledge); and, only when there is a close match, the most relevant passages of your knowledge, the instructions you wrote for the bot and the last messages of that conversation (to write the answer)
Stripe	Payments, checkout, the customer portal, invoices and VAT	Name and email of customers who open Checkout (sent when their Stripe customer record is created, and kept after the account is deleted); the billing address, VAT number and payment card entered in Checkout
The provider of our electronic invoicing system	Lets us issue electronic invoices and send them to the Sistema di Interscambio	The e-invoice details (type, name, tax code, VAT number, address, SDI code or PEC) and the amounts of the invoiced payments. Legal basis: legal obligation, issuing and transmitting the invoice (Article 6(1)(c) GDPR)
Agenzia delle Entrate (the Italian tax agency), Sistema di Interscambio (SdI)	Receives electronic invoices and delivers them to the recipient, as Italian law requires	The electronic invoices issued, with the e-invoice details on them. Legal basis: legal obligation, issuing and transmitting the invoice (Article 6(1)(c) GDPR)
PostHog (EU Cloud, servers in the EU)	Product analytics, session recordings and error tracking	The pseudonymous events described in section 3, browser events only after your consent
Google	"Sign in with Google", only if you use it	Google tells us your name, email address, whether it is verified, and your Google account ID. Google handles your Google account under its own privacy policy.

Some of these providers are based in the United States or may access data from there. Where personal data leaves the European Economic Area, the transfer relies on the EU–US Data Privacy Framework where the provider is certified under it, or on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses, as set out in each provider's data processing terms.

We don't sell personal data and don't use it for advertising.

6. How long we keep it

Data	Kept until
Account, chatbot, knowledge, uploaded files, widget settings	You delete them, or you delete your account
Chats on an owner's website	The owner deletes the account. There is no automatic expiry: owners decide how long they keep their visitors' chats.
Contact details left on an owner's website	The owner deletes them or the account
Chats on our own website	90 days after the chat starts, then deleted automatically
Sign-in sessions	They expire after 2 hours without activity, and when you sign out or delete your account
Password-reset links	Valid for 60 minutes. Expired links are deleted within a day, and any link is deleted at once when you delete your account.
Server error logs	14 days
Your cookie choice	6 months, then we ask again
Billing data held by Stripe (name, email, billing address, VAT number, invoices)	Kept after you delete your account, for as long as tax and accounting law requires (in Italy, generally ten years)
E-invoice details (type, name, tax code, VAT number, address, SDI code or PEC)	The copy in our database: until you remove them or delete your account. The details already sent to our administration by email, those held in our electronic invoicing system and those on issued invoices: for as long as tax law requires (in Italy, generally ten years), also after you delete your account.
Analytics in PostHog	Under our current plan, PostHog keeps events for 1 year, session recordings for up to 30 days, and person profiles until they are deleted. When you delete your account, our server sends PostHog a request to delete the person linked to it, with its events and recordings.

Deleting your account (Account page, "Delete account") cancels any subscription at once and permanently deletes your account, your chatbot, its knowledge, files, chats and contacts, the e-invoice details held in our database, your sessions and any password-reset link.

7. Your rights

Under the GDPR you can ask us to:

give you a copy of your data (access) and send it to you in a reusable format (portability);
correct it (rectification);
delete it (erasure);
limit how we use it (restriction);
stop using it for our legitimate interests, including the server-side analytics (objection);
and you can withdraw your consent to analytics at any time with "Cookie settings", without affecting what was done before.

You can change your name and delete your account yourself on the Account page. For anything else, write to info@ferlabel.com. We answer within one month, and may ask you to confirm that the account is yours.

If you chatted on an owner's website, send your request to that website's owner. We will help them answer it. For a chat on our own website, write to us.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority, in Italy the Garante per la protezione dei dati personali (www.garanteprivacy.it).

8. Security

Connections use HTTPS. Passwords are stored as hashes. Uploaded files are stored outside the public web folder and are never served at a public address. Each account can reach only its own chatbot, and each chat only its own chatbot's knowledge.

9. Children

NextAsk is a service for businesses and is not meant for children.

10. Changes

If we change this policy, we update the date at the top. If the change is significant, we tell account holders by email before it applies.