Privacy Policy
Salty, operated by Amaracus Ltd · Last updated 19 October 2026
Salty is a tool that businesses connect to their own Instagram account. When someone contacts that business — by commenting on its posts or sending it a direct message — Salty helps the business reply.
Replies come from an AI assistant, and they say so. Salty's AI assistant writes and sends replies on the business's behalf, in the business's own voice. Its first message in a conversation ends with a line naming the business's AI assistant, and it says so again when it picks a conversation back up after a day, or after the business's team has been handling it. If you ask whether you are talking to a bot, it tells you. You can ask to talk to a person at any time.
Who is responsible for your data
If you commented on or messaged a business that uses Salty, that business is the data controller. It decides what to do with your message. Amaracus Ltd is a data processor: we handle the data only on that business's instructions, and we do not use it for our own purposes. Our Data Processing Agreement with each business sets out those instructions and how we protect the data.
To exercise your rights, you can contact the business directly, or contact us at filippos@amaracus.org and we will act on the controller's instruction.
What we process, and why
| Data | Why |
|---|---|
| The text of your comment or message | To understand what you asked and write a relevant reply |
| Your Instagram username and the account ID Instagram gives us | To address you, and to send the reply to the right conversation |
| Which post you commented on | To give the reply context, and to report to the business which posts lead to conversations |
| Whether a reply was delivered, read, or clicked | To report on whether the business's replies are useful |
| Contact details and enquiry notes recorded by the business | To manage your enquiry in its CRM. This may include your name, email and phone number shared for follow-up. |
| What you asked to see, and when it suits you | If the business uses appointment requests, so its team can arrange it with you. Nothing is booked until they confirm it with you. |
| Your messages, already redacted, in a review of recent conversations | If the business runs one, to find questions its assistant could not answer. The report points to conversations, not to people, and the business decides what, if anything, to change. |
| Your messages, already redacted, saved by the business as a test | If the business saves a conversation in its assistant's test sandbox, to check how the assistant would answer after the business changes it. Nothing is sent to you, and the copy is deleted with your conversation. |
| Your message, already redacted, next to the reply someone on the business's team wrote to it | If the business turns it on, so Salty can suggest how its assistant could sound more like the business's own team. Replies are kept as text, from Instagram or from Salty's inbox, never photos or other media, and never replies the assistant wrote. A reply the business's team wrote in public under your comment is kept on its own, without your comment, though the reply itself may address you by name. The business decides what, if anything, to change, and nothing reaches its assistant until the business publishes it. Kept for at most 90 days, and deleted at once if the business turns it off. |
| A reference to an order, if you buy something | To tell the business the conversation led to a sale. We receive an order reference and amount, not your payment details. |
| Your name, email, phone number, number of orders, total spent and email marketing choice, as a customer of the business's Shopify store | If the business connects its Shopify store and turns on its customer list, so its own team sees the store's customers in one list, and which of them also wrote to it on Instagram. Never your address. |
| Whether a visit from a Salty link reached the cart or checkout | If the business turns it on, its Shopify store's pixel measures whether a visit that came from a link Salty sent you added something to the cart, started checkout or completed checkout, and the checkout's total. It runs only if you allow analytics in the store's cookie choices. We record the step, when, and which link: not your IP address, device, what is in your cart or who you are. |
Message text and CRM contact details are handled separately.
We redact recognized email addresses, phone numbers and card-like numbers
from inbound text before saving new queued messages or conversation history
and before sending it to the AI model. A recognized phone number becomes
[REDACTED_PHONE]. Detection is pattern-based and may not catch
every format.
The business can separately record contact details and enquiry notes in its own CRM card for follow-up. These fields are available to the business and authorized Salty operators, are not included in the agent's message history or reply-monitoring copies, and can be corrected or cleared. Change history records which fields changed without retaining their old values.
A business can also let its assistant save contact details for follow-up. If it has turned this on and you send a phone number or email in a comment or message when asking to be contacted — or agree when the assistant asks — it is saved to that business's CRM card instead of being kept in the message text. Until then it is held separately for at most 24 hours, and deleted if you did not ask to be contacted. It is never sent to the AI model.
Email marketing signups. A business can also let its assistant offer, at most once per conversation, to add you to its own email list on Klaviyo. Typing your email in a message is not agreement: you are added only if you clearly say yes to that offer and send your email after it. We then send your email to the business's own Klaviyo account, where the business's list settings apply, and keep a record of the consent for the business: the offer's exact wording, the message that showed it, your words agreeing, when, and that it happened in an Instagram message. Until you agree, an email you send in a message is held separately for at most 24 hours and is never sent to the AI model. You can unsubscribe from the business's emails at any time with the link in any email.
The business's store customers. If a business connects its Shopify store and turns on its customer list, Salty reads the store's customers through the access the business granted: name, email, phone number, number of orders, total spent and email marketing choice, and never an address. They are stored encrypted and shown only to that business's own team. They are never sent to the AI model and never used to message anyone: Salty still only replies to people who wrote to the business first. A conversation is linked to a store customer only when an order from it was matched to that conversation, or, where the business has turned this on, when you agreed in it to share your email (to receive the business's emails) or your phone number (to be contacted) and that detail matches exactly one of the store's customers. The link lets the business's team see that customer's orders beside the conversation, and nothing else. Salty records who on the business's team opened a customer's details, and when. The whole list is deleted when the business disconnects or uninstalls its store, or when Shopify asks on the store's behalf, and a customer is deleted when the store deletes them or Shopify asks on their behalf.
What we never do
- We never message you first. Salty only acts after you have contacted the business.
- We do not scrape your profile. We use only what Instagram's official API provides, what you wrote to the business, the business's own records in a store it connected, and facts the business has approved about itself. We never read the websites or profiles of people who contact a business.
- We do not sell your data, and we do not use it for advertising or to build profiles across businesses. Each business's data is kept separate from every other's.
- We do not use your messages to train AI models.
What the business tells its assistant
A business can give its assistant approved facts about itself: delivery, returns, opening hours, the areas it covers. It can write them itself or use site import, where it chooses up to ten pages of its own website, confirms it owns the site, and asks Salty to read them, then later, if it wants, to check the same pages again for changes: when it asks, or automatically once a week if it turns that on. These are facts about the business, not about you.
- Our reader, SaltyBot, identifies itself, follows the site's robots.txt and reads only the pages the business chose. To suggest pages to choose from, it reads only the site's robots.txt, its sitemap and a few common addresses such as a FAQ page. It does not follow links or read any other site.
- We keep no copy of the pages. We keep the facts drafted from them, the page address, when it was read, a fingerprint of the text and a quote of at most 300 characters showing where each fact came from.
- Names, phone numbers and email addresses are left out. Nothing reaches the assistant until the business has reviewed and published it.
- The page text goes to Anthropic to draft the facts, as described below: once per import or check, and in a weekly check only for pages whose text changed since they were last read. Changes are only proposed to the business. These records are deleted with the rest of the business's data.
A business can also upload a PDF of its own, such as a policy sheet or a service guide, after confirming it is the business's own document and holds no customer's personal details.
- The file is read once and then discarded. We keep no copy of the file or its text: only its name, a fingerprint of the file, when it was read, and a quote of at most 300 characters behind each fact.
- The same rules apply as for site import: names, phone numbers and email addresses are left out, the text goes to Anthropic once to draft the facts, and nothing reaches the assistant until the business has reviewed and published it.
A business with a connected Shopify store can also import its store policies, such as refunds and shipping. Salty reads them through the access the business granted when it connected the store, not from the web page, and records who started each import. The same rules apply as for a PDF.
How we check the agent is behaving
Salty writes replies automatically, so we monitor what it actually says. Amaracus Ltd's own internal Slack workspace receives a copy of:
- Each reply sent through Salty on a business's behalf: the text of the reply, the account ID Instagram gives us for the person it was sent to (or the ID of the comment it answered), and which business it was sent for. This includes replies the business's own team writes in Salty: in Salty's inbox, as a fixed reply to comments, or by editing a reply before approving it.
- Each item waiting for the business's approval, if the business has chosen to approve some replies or actions first: which business, what is waiting, and the Instagram username of the person it concerns (or, when Salty does not have it, the IDs above). For a reply, it includes the text waiting to be sent; for a comment flagged to be hidden, the text of the comment; for an email signup, the words the person agreed with.
Our staff read these copies to catch mistakes — a wrong price, an invented product, the wrong tone — to fix them, and to notice replies left waiting. Copies in our Slack are deleted automatically after 90 days. The same copies are written to our application's log, which our hosting provider keeps for 7 days; we use it only to run and fix the service. Our alerts about faults, such as a reply that could not be sent, identify the conversation by the IDs above.
Messages people send are redacted when they arrive, as described above, so the email addresses, phone numbers and card numbers that redaction catches are not in a copied comment or in the words agreeing to a signup, and the assistant never sees them to repeat them. Replies written by the business's team are copied exactly as typed: if someone on the team types a phone number or email address into a reply, the copy contains it.
This is quality assurance on the tool, carried out for the business as its processor. Only Amaracus Ltd's staff can read these copies. They are not used for advertising, not used to train AI models, and not shared outside Amaracus Ltd. A business can ask us to turn it off for its account: from then on, no copy of its replies or of items waiting for its approval reaches our Slack, and the log records only that one was sent or is waiting, for which business, without the person or the text.
The website itself
Separately from anything above: our own website, usesalty.com, uses Vercel Web Analytics to count visits. It is cookieless — it sets nothing on your device, does not follow you to other sites, and does not build a profile of you. What it records is aggregate: how many people opened a page, roughly where in the world from, and which page they came from.
Demo requests. If you ask for a demo or early access through the form on our website, Amaracus Ltd keeps what you send — your name, email address, company, message and where you heard of us — in its own database, and sends a copy to its own Slack so that someone can reply to you. For this, Amaracus Ltd is the controller. We use it to answer you and to talk with you about Salty, never for advertising, and we do not share it with the businesses that use Salty. It is kept for 12 months after you send it, and the copy in our Slack for 90 days. To have it deleted sooner, write to filippos@amaracus.org.
This is about visitors to our marketing site. It has nothing to do with messages sent to a business using Salty, which are covered above.
Who else processes it
| Who | What for |
|---|---|
| Anthropic | Generating the reply, drafting facts from pages a business imports from its own website, a PDF it uploads or its Shopify store's policies, and suggesting improvements to the business's assistant from replies its team corrected or, if it turns this on, wrote. Message text is sent for processing and is not used to train their models. |
| Meta (Instagram) | The platform the conversation happens on |
| Fly.io | Hosting, including our application's log. Data is stored in Frankfurt, Germany (EU). |
| Tigris Data (through Fly.io's object storage) | Storing our encrypted daily backups of the database, once we switch them on, in Frankfurt, Germany (EU), for 30 days. They are encrypted before they leave our systems, so Tigris cannot read them. |
| Vercel | Hosts our website and counts visits to it, without cookies. Not involved in your conversations. |
| Shopify | Only where the business uses it, for order matching, measuring cart and checkout steps after a Salty link (only with your consent to analytics) and, if it asks, reading its store policies and its store customers |
| Klaviyo | Only where the business uses it and you agreed to its email signup offer: your email goes to the business's own Klaviyo list |
| The business's own Slack | Where the business reviews replies before they are sent, if it has chosen to do so |
| Amaracus Ltd's own Slack | Where our staff read copies of replies sent through Salty and of items waiting for a business's approval, to check the assistant is behaving correctly, as described above, and requests sent with our website's demo form. Deleted automatically after 90 days. |
| LangChain, Inc. (LangSmith) | Operational traces of each reply run (timings, tool names, errors and token counts), used to find errors and measure cost. It never receives the message text, usernames or IDs. Stored in the European Union (LangSmith EU region). |
Where it is stored, and for how long
Data is stored in the European Union (Frankfurt, Germany). We keep conversation records for as long as the business is a Salty customer, so it can see its own history, and we delete them within 30 days of the business ending its use of Salty or asking us to erase them. Replies a business's team wrote, kept with the message each one answered so Salty can suggest improvements, are kept for at most 90 days. A store's customer list is kept only while the store is connected, as described above, and the record of who opened a customer's details is kept for one year. Copies in our internal Slack, described above, are deleted automatically after 90 days, and our hosting provider keeps our application's log for 7 days.
Backups: our hosting provider takes encrypted daily snapshots of the database, kept for 5 days. Once we switch them on, we also keep encrypted daily backups with Tigris for 30 days. Deleting data does not rewrite a backup: deleted data leaves the backups when they expire.
Your rights
Under the GDPR you can ask for a copy of your data, ask for it to be corrected, or ask for it to be deleted. See how to request deletion. We respond within 30 days.
You can also stop Salty from processing anything new at any time, by not messaging or commenting on the business's account, or by blocking it on Instagram.
Contact
Amaracus Ltd — filippos@amaracus.org
If you are in the EU and believe we have handled your data improperly, you have the right to complain to your national data protection authority.