Legal

Privacy Policy

Last updated

Plain-English summary. AskNode is a business-to-business operation run by Samuel Pickford in South Australia. This website collects personal information in three ways: when you submit the demo request form, when the anti-bot check on that form runs, and when you use the assistant on the page. We use it to reply to you and to run the site. We do not sell it, we do not use advertising cookies, and we do not run third-party analytics. The detail follows.

1. Who we are

AskNode (“we”, “us”) builds CRM, knowledge base and language-model agnostic chatbots for large organisations. We operate asknode.io (the “site”).

Operated by: Samuel Pickford, trading as AskNode
Location: Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
Contact for privacy matters: hello@asknode.io

We are an Australian business. For the purposes of the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) we are the entity that collects and holds the personal information described in this policy.

2. Who this policy applies to

This policy covers personal information collected through the site. It is a business-to-business website and is not directed at consumers or at children.

A note on whether the Privacy Act applies to us. The Privacy Act 1988 generally does not apply to small businesses with an annual turnover under AU$3 million, and AskNode is currently in that category. We have nonetheless written this policy to the standard of the Australian Privacy Principles, because we expect the Act to apply to us as we grow, because some large customers require it contractually, and because other laws — including the GDPR provisions in section 11 — can apply regardless. If you believe the Act applies to us and think we have breached it, you are still welcome to raise it with us and with the OAIC.

3. What we collect, and why

3.1 Demo request form

When you submit the form on our home page we collect what you type into it:

  • your name
  • your work email address
  • your organisation’s name
  • your role (optional)
  • your primary CRM or ITSM platform
  • your preferred language model (optional)
  • your organisation’s approximate size (optional)
  • your description of what you would like to automate

Why: to respond to your enquiry, arrange a demo, and keep a record of the conversation. If you do not provide it: we cannot reply to you. The fields marked optional are genuinely optional.

We also record the date and time of submission and the referring page, and we process your IP address as described in 3.3 and 3.4.

3.2 The honeypot field

The form contains one field that is hidden from human visitors and is used solely to detect automated submissions. If a bot fills it, the submission is discarded. It is not a question about you and no meaningful information is collected from it.

3.3 Anti-bot check (Cloudflare Turnstile)

To stop spam reaching our inbox we use Cloudflare Turnstile, which runs a challenge in your browser. Cloudflare processes your IP address, browser and device characteristics, and challenge signals for the purpose of determining whether you are human. We receive only a pass or fail result and a token. We cannot identify you from it.

3.4 Server and application logs

Our hosting provider records standard request metadata — IP address, timestamp, requested URL, user agent — for security, abuse prevention and troubleshooting. We also write application logs for each form submission and assistant question that record the time, a random request identifier, and the IP address, so that abuse and delivery failures can be investigated.

3.5 What we do not collect

We do not use advertising or analytics cookies. We do not run Google Analytics, advertising pixels, session recording or cross-site tracking of any kind. We do not attempt to identify individual visitors. We do not collect sensitive information (as defined in the Privacy Act) and we do not knowingly collect information about children.

4. The AskNode website assistant

The phone interface on our home page is a working demonstration of an AskNode assistant. When you ask it a question, the following happens:

  • Your question is sent to a third-party language model provider (currently OpenAI) so that it can generate an answer, and to an embedding service so that relevant parts of our own published content can be found.
  • Your question is grounded in our website content only. The assistant is instructed to answer from AskNode’s own material and to decline anything outside that scope.
  • We do not store your conversation. Questions and answers are held in memory only for the duration of the request. Our logs record the length of the question, which retrieval method was used, token counts and your IP address — but not the text of what you asked.

Please do not enter confidential, personal or sensitive information into the assistant. It is a public demonstration, and anything you type is transmitted to a third-party model provider overseas. For anything substantive, email us instead.

5. Who else handles your information

We share personal information only with the service providers needed to run this site, and only for the purposes described here:

  • Cloudflare — hosting and content delivery, Turnstile anti-bot checks, the vector database used for assistant retrieval, and rate limiting.
  • OpenAI — generating assistant answers and producing the embeddings used to search our content.
  • SMTP2GO — delivering demo request notifications to our own mailbox.
  • Google Fonts — serving the web fonts used on this site. This means Google receives your IP address when the page loads.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for advertising. We may disclose it where we are required or permitted by law, or to establish or defend legal claims.

6. Disclosure overseas

All of the providers listed above are based in, or store data in, countries other than Australia — principally the United States. This means personal information collected through the site may be disclosed to recipients overseas.

Where we disclose personal information overseas we take reasonable steps to ensure it is handled consistently with the Australian Privacy Principles, including by relying on the contractual commitments offered by those providers and by limiting what we send them to the minimum needed. You can ask us for more detail using the contact address below.

7. How long we keep it

  • Demo requests — kept for up to 24 months from our last contact with you, or until you ask us to delete them. If we enter into a contract, relevant records are kept for the life of that contract and for the period required for tax and legal purposes.
  • Assistant questions — not retained by us. The third-party provider’s handling is governed by their own terms.
  • Server and application logs — retained for a short period by our hosting provider for security and troubleshooting, then deleted.

When personal information is no longer needed we delete it or de-identify it.

8. Security

The site is served over HTTPS. Form submissions are validated and rate limited before any email is sent, and anti-bot checks are verified on our server rather than in your browser. Access to enquiry information is limited to those who need it. No system is perfectly secure, so we cannot guarantee absolute security — please avoid sending sensitive information through the site.

If we become aware of a data breach that is likely to result in serious harm and the Privacy Act applies to us, we will assess it and notify affected individuals and the OAIC as required by the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme.

9. Cookies and local storage

This site sets no cookies of its own and uses no local storage. Our hosting and anti-bot providers may set strictly necessary cookies or equivalent local storage to keep you safe and to make the site work — for example to remember the outcome of an anti-bot challenge.

Because we set no analytics or advertising cookies, you will not see a cookie banner on this site. If we ever add analytics that are not strictly necessary, we will update this policy and, where the law requires it, ask for your consent first.

10. Access, correction and complaints

You can ask us to:

  • give you access to the personal information we hold about you
  • correct information that is inaccurate, out of date, incomplete or misleading
  • delete information we no longer need
  • stop sending you communications, or stop using your information for a particular purpose
  • tell you how we handle your information, including where it has been disclosed

Email hello@asknode.io and we will respond within 30 days. There is no charge for making a request. We may ask you to confirm your identity so that we do not disclose information to the wrong person.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, contact us first and we will try to resolve it. If you are not satisfied, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC):

11. If you are in the UK or the EEA

We are an Australian business, but if you are in the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area then the UK GDPR or the EU GDPR may apply to our handling of your personal data. Where it does, the following applies in addition to the rest of this policy.

  • Lawful bases. We rely on consent for the demo request form, given when you tick the consent box, and on legitimate interests for the anti-bot check, server and application logs, and answering the assistant’s questions. We have balanced those interests against your rights: the data involved is minimal, short-lived and used only to protect the service and respond to you.
  • Your additional rights. You have the right to be informed, of access, to rectification, to erasure, to restrict or object to processing, to data portability, and to withdraw consent at any time. Withdrawing consent does not affect processing carried out before you withdrew it.
  • International transfers. Where personal data is transferred outside the UK or EEA we rely on appropriate safeguards — the UK International Data Transfer Addendum, the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, or an applicable adequacy decision — together with the provider’s supplementary security measures.
  • Automated decisions. We do not use your personal data for automated decision-making that produces legal or similarly significant effects, and we do not use it to train machine learning models.
  • Supervisory authority. You have the right to complain to your local supervisory authority. In the UK that is the Information Commissioner’s Office, ico.org.uk. We would appreciate the chance to put things right first.

12. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy to reflect changes to the site or the law. The date at the top shows when it last changed. Where a change is material, we will make it clear on the site.

13. Contact

Questions, requests or concerns about privacy: hello@asknode.io.