Privacy policy
What personal data Border Bot collects, why, who processes it for us, how long we keep it and your rights.
1. Who we are
Border Bot (“we”, “us”) runs border.bot, including the website and its free tools, the dashboard, the REST API and the MCP server. We are the controller of the personal data described in this policy, except where we act for a customer, as explained below.
Contact us about anything in this policy at info@border.bot. We have not appointed a data protection officer; the same address reaches the person responsible for data protection.
This policy applies under the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, and under the EU GDPR where it applies to you.
2. What we collect
Account and workspace data. Your name, email address and sign-in details (handled by WorkOS, our sign-in provider, which sends the one-time codes we email you), and any profile details you add, such as job title or phone number. For your workspace: its name, website, logo, description, industry and country. When you give us your company’s website during setup, we read it to suggest these details, including contact details the site publishes.
What you submit and the results. Product descriptions, product page URLs and their content, images and files, HS codes, values, quantities, countries, and for screening the names, companies and countries of the parties you check. We store each request with its result, the data sources it used, and which user, API key or AI assistant made it. We also keep feedback you give on results.
Billing data. The packages you buy, amounts, invoices and your credit history. Stripe processes card payments; we receive confirmation of payment and limited billing details, never your full card number.
API keys and AI-assistant connections. Your API keys (stored as hashes), and for each connected assistant its name, the workspace it bills and the permissions you granted.
Request logs. For every request to our API, including those the website and dashboard make for you: the time, path, status, your IP address, browser or client (user agent), the workspace, user or key, and the full request and response, with passwords, API keys and other secrets removed.
Free tools. When you use the free tools without an account, we keep keyed hashes (HMAC) of your IP address, of the network range around it and of a random visitor identifier stored in the bb_vid cookie; the country and network (ASN) your request came from; and what you entered and the result. We don’t store your raw IP address for this. Cloudflare Turnstile checks that you are a person.
Audit records. Changes to workspaces, members, keys, billing and settings, with who made them, when, and the IP address they came from.
Crawler and referral statistics. For visits from search and AI crawlers and AI assistants, we count the page, response status, referring site, crawler name and network (ASN), without your IP address.
We collect most of this from you. Some comes from WorkOS (sign-in), Stripe (payment status) and Cloudflare (country and network of a request). You don’t have to give us personal data, but we can’t provide an account without an email address.
3. How we use it and our lawful bases
- To provide the service: accounts, workspaces, classifications, calculations, checks, history, API keys and AI-assistant connections. Lawful basis: performance of our contract with you. For people who use the service on behalf of a business customer, our legitimate interest in providing the service that customer asked for.
- To bill for credits and keep financial records. Lawful basis: contract, and the legal obligation to keep tax and accounting records.
- To keep a customs record of every result and the data it used, so that we and our customers can explain a result to a customs authority later. Lawful basis: our legitimate interest, and our customers’, in being able to show how a result was reached.
- To secure the service and prevent abuse: request logs, audit records, rate limits, bot checks and free-run limits. Lawful basis: our legitimate interest in keeping the service secure and fair.
- To support you and send service messages, such as sign-in codes, notice of changes to our terms, and security alerts. Lawful basis: contract and legitimate interest.
- To improve the service: we review results and feedback to find errors, and may turn a corrected result into a test case for our classifier. Lawful basis: our legitimate interest in accurate results.
- To meet legal obligations and establish, exercise or defend legal claims.
4. AI processing and automated decisions
Classifications, origin findings and some checks are produced with AI models. The product details, page content, images and files you submit, and for screening the names you check, are sent to the AI model providers listed below to produce a result. We send what a task needs, not your account details. The providers process it under their API terms to return a result to us.
We don’t make decisions about you that have legal or similarly significant effects based solely on automated processing. The free tools automatically limit or refuse free runs from some networks and after the free-run limit; you can still create an account.
5. Who we share it with
We use these service providers (processors) to run Border Bot. They process personal data only for us, under written terms.
- Cloudflare (US): hosting (Workers), storage (R2 and KV), database connections (Hyperdrive), network security, bot checks (Turnstile), usage statistics (Analytics Engine), AI models (Workers AI), routing of AI requests (AI Gateway), and short-term service logs. We also use Cloudflare Access to protect our own admin tools.
- PlanetScale (US): our Postgres database, hosted in the eastern United States.
- WorkOS (US): sign-in, sign-in emails and organisation membership.
- Stripe: payments and invoices.
- Upstash: the search index we use to find HS codes. It holds tariff data and receives numeric search vectors derived from product descriptions, not your account details.
- AI model providers: Google (Vertex AI and Gemini), Anthropic, and other model providers we choose for particular tasks, such as OpenAI, Mistral or Voyage AI. Contact us for the current list.
When you ask us to read a product or company web page, our servers fetch it from that website, which sees a request from us but not your details.
We may also disclose personal data where the law requires, to protect our rights or others’ safety, to professional advisers, or to a business that takes over the service, in which case this policy will continue to apply to your data. We do not sell personal data or share it for advertising.
6. International transfers
Our database and several providers are in the United States, so your personal data is transferred outside the UK and the European Economic Area. Where a transfer needs a safeguard, we rely on the transfer mechanism the provider offers: UK or EU adequacy regulations where they apply (including the UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework for certified US companies), the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or Addendum, or the EU Standard Contractual Clauses. Email info@border.bot for more information or a copy of the relevant safeguard.
7. How long we keep it
- Customs records: every classification, calculation, restricted-goods check and screening check, with its input, result, data sources and who made it, is kept permanently. Customs authorities can ask what a result was based on years later, and our database is built so these records cannot be deleted in the ordinary course. If the law requires us to erase personal data in them, we do so.
- Audit records of changes, including the actor and IP address: kept permanently, for the same reason.
- Full request logs: 400 days, then deleted. Request bodies kept in our quick-view index are cleared after 30 days. After 400 days, the IP address, user agent, query, body and user details are removed from the index, leaving only the time, path and status of each request. We may shorten these periods.
- Short-term service logs kept by Cloudflare: up to 7 days.
- Account and workspace details: while your account is open. When you ask us to close your account, we delete or anonymise your profile, except what we must keep under this section.
- Billing records and credit history: for as long as your workspace exists, and at least as long as tax and accounting law requires.
- AI-assistant connections: until you disconnect them. Access tokens expire on their own.
- Free-tool records: free-run counters reset when the free-run period ends. Records of free runs, which hold only hashed identifiers, are kept to detect abuse and have no fixed deletion date yet; we will review this and update this policy.
9. Data customers give us about other people
When a customer submits personal data about other people, for example a buyer’s or consignee’s name for denied-party screening, we process it for that customer as its processor, under our terms. The customer is the controller and is responsible for telling those people. If that applies to you, contact the business that used Border Bot; we will help it respond.
10. Border Bot for Shopify
When a merchant installs our Shopify app, Border Bot, Shopify gives us access to that store under the permissions the merchant approves. The app keeps:
- The store’s domain, name, country, currency and Shopify plan, and its settings in the app. Each store gets its own border.bot workspace, created when the app is first opened: its products, HS codes and quote history are kept there, separate from every other store, and the app keeps that workspace’s key encrypted. Usage is billed through the store’s Shopify plan. Staff the merchant invites can view the workspace in theborder.bot dashboard.
- The store’s products: titles, types, vendors, descriptions, SKUs, prices, weights, images, product page links, HS codes and countries of origin. The app uses them to quote duties and to suggest HS codes, which are written back to Shopify only when the merchant approves them. It also records the email address of the staff member who approved or rejected each suggestion.
- For each estimate a buyer sees in checkout or on the cart page: the cart lines (product variant, quantity and price), the destination country and region, the currency and the shipping price. We don’t receive or keep the buyer’s name, email address, street address or payment details. Quotes are cached for a short time by a hash of these details, so a repeat request isn’t charged again.
- Counts of quotes and credits used, and billing records for Shopify charges.
Product details go to border.bot’s service and our AI providers to classify them, as described above. When a merchant uninstalls the app, the workspace’s keys are revoked at once. Shopify then asks us to erase the store’s data (about 48 hours later): the app deletes everything it holds for that store, and everything that identifies the store is erased from its workspace, including the record of past changes. Only anonymous customs records (HS codes and calculation results, with no store, product names or other details) are kept. Requests from a store’s customers to see or erase their data are answered and recorded. The app holds no personal data about them, so there is nothing to return or delete.
11. Security
We protect personal data with encryption in transit, per-workspace isolation enforced by the database, hashed API keys, redacted logs and restricted admin access. Read more on our security page. No system is perfectly secure; if a breach affects you, we will tell you and the regulator as the law requires.
12. Your rights
Under data protection law you have the right to:
- get a copy of your personal data;
- have inaccurate data corrected;
- have your data deleted, where we have no lawful reason to keep it;
- restrict our processing, or object to processing based on legitimate interests;
- receive data you gave us in a portable format, where processing is based on contract;
- withdraw consent at any time, where we rely on it.
Email info@border.bot to use these rights. We may need to confirm your identity. We will reply within one month, which the law allows us to extend in some cases. Some rights are limited for the customs records we must keep, but we will explain any limit that applies.
13. Complaints
If you are unhappy with how we handle your personal data, please complain to us first at info@border.bot; we will acknowledge your complaint and tell you the outcome. You can also complain to the UK regulator, the Information Commission (ICO), at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint. If you live in the EU, you can complain to the data protection authority in your country.
14. Children
Border Bot is a business service for adults. You must be 18 or over to create an account, and we don’t knowingly collect personal data from children.
15. Changes to this policy
We will update this page when our practices change. For significant changes, we will tell account holders in advance by email or in the dashboard. The date at the end of this page shows when it last changed.
16. Contact
Questions about privacy: info@border.bot.
Last updated