AI notice, privacy and limits

Answer Desk > Rules and privacy covers the two duties of a public AI chat: telling people they are talking to a machine, and looking after what they write. The Where you stand card lists five items with a tick or an exclamation mark, so you see what is still to do.

Where you stand

• Visitors are told they are talking to an AI, before they write: always ticked.
• A privacy notice is linked from the chat: ticked when a privacy page is chosen here or set in WordPress under Settings > Privacy.
• Conversations are deleted after a set time.
• The assistant answers only from your documents: ticked while that option is on under How it answers.
• There is a way to reach a person: ticked when you fill in what it says when it does not know.

This is a checklist, not a certificate: no plugin can declare your site compliant.

The notice visitors see first

Article 50 of the EU AI Act, applying from 2 August 2026, requires that people know they are interacting with an AI, at the latest at the first interaction. Answer Desk shows a notice above the first message. It cannot be switched off.

1. In Your wording, write your own text or a translation. Leave it empty to use the suggested text: "You are chatting with an automated assistant, not a person. It answers using this organisation's own documents, and it can be wrong."
2. In Privacy notice to link, choose your privacy page, or leave The privacy page set in WordPress settings.
3. Click Save.

The sentence about how long the conversation is kept and the privacy link are added automatically, so do not write them yourself. Shown to visitors right now: displays the final text.

What is kept, and for how long

• Keep the conversations: on by default. Off means nothing is stored and the Conversations screen stays empty.
• Delete them after: number of days, default 90. Deletion runs automatically once a day and really removes the data. In the free version at most 30 days apply, whatever the saved value, and the box shows the number really applied (30 on a new install). With a licence or the trial, the number you chose applies.
• Messages per visitor per hour and Most answers in a day: see Fine tuning and running costs.

Click Save in this card. No IP address is stored: to count messages per visitor, the plugin keeps a one-way fingerprint that recognises the same visitor for an hour and cannot be turned back into an address.

Who else sees the messages

This table lists your processors (the GDPR term for companies that handle data for you): the AI provider that answers, the index provider, and your own website, with what each receives and where it processes. No One Productions Digital receives nothing; the only request to us is the licence check, which sends the site address and the key.

WordPress privacy tools

• Answer Desk adds a suggested paragraph titled "Automated chat assistant" to the WordPress privacy policy guide (under Settings > Privacy), naming your AI provider, where it processes and your retention period. Copy it into your privacy page.
• It registers with Tools > Export Personal Data and Tools > Erase Personal Data. These find conversations by email address, so they cover visitors who were logged in to your site when they chatted. Anonymous conversations are not linked to a person.

What remains your job