How Ask a Shop Owner handles your conversations

The questions owner operators ask Ask a Shop Owner are personal. Hiring decisions, firing decisions, cash flow problems, customer complaints, family in the business, the whole landscape. We take that seriously. Here is the honest, plain-English version of what we do with it.

The short version

We do not sell your conversations to third parties.
We do not hand your conversations to outside model providers to train on their behalf.
We do use your conversations in-house to operate the Service, evaluate quality, grow the corpus, and train and fine-tune our own models, the standard practice across consumer AI products.
You can delete your account at any time. Some de-identified, aggregated, or model-trained derivatives may be retained.

What we do log, and why

We keep your account information so you can sign in, your conversation history so you can come back to a thread, and basic usage telemetry so we can tell when the product is broken. That is the whole list.

What we do not log

We do not record audio.
We do not run third party advertising trackers on your account pages.
We do not share your account with marketing partners.

Training data, in detail

Most consumer AI products, ChatGPT, Gemini, the consumer tier of Claude, use your conversations to improve their models. We do the same, and we are upfront about it. The data flows back into our corpus and into evaluation and training for our own models. The line we hold is twofold: we do not sell that data, and we do not pass it to outside model providers for them to train on. That is in our Terms and Privacy Policy in full.

Deletion

You can delete your account from settings. When you do, your conversation history is removed from production systems and rolls out of backups on a defined schedule. As our Privacy Policy explains, de-identified, aggregated, and model-trained derivatives of your data may be retained after deletion and remain ours, that is how the model keeps the improvements your conversations contributed to.

The full legal version of this is in our privacy policy and data handling pages.

Common questions about this topic

Do you sell my data?

No. We do not sell or share your conversations, account information, or usage history with third parties for advertising or resale.

Do you use my conversations to train your models?

Yes, like every major AI product, we use conversations in-house to operate the Service, evaluate quality, and train and fine-tune our own models. We do not hand them to outside model providers. See our Terms and Privacy Policy for the full scope.

Can I delete my account and history?

Yes. You can delete your account and conversation history at any time. As described in our Privacy Policy, de-identified, aggregated, and model-trained derivatives of your data may be retained after deletion.