Privacy Policy

01Who we are

Talisk ("Talisk", "we", "us") is an AI-assisted email and bookkeeping service for small businesses, operated by:

Talisk Technologies Inc. is the organization responsible for the personal information processed through the Talisk service at taliskhq.com (formerly talisk.ai) and the Talisk applications (the "Service"). This policy explains what information we collect, why we collect it, who we share it with, and the rights you have over it.

We comply with the Canadian federal Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), the British Columbia Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA), and, for Quebec residents, the Act respecting the protection of personal information in the private sector as amended by Law 25.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not use your data for advertising.

02Privacy Officer

The person in charge of the protection of personal information at Talisk is:

Contact the Privacy Officer for any question about this policy, to exercise your rights (section 11), or to make a complaint about how your information is handled.

03Information we collect

Account information

When you create an account: your name, email address, and a password (stored as a salted hash, so we cannot read it). If you enable two-factor authentication, we store the secrets needed to verify your codes. Purpose: creating and securing your account.

Connected mailbox — email content and metadata

Talisk is an email client. When you connect a mailbox (Google, Microsoft, or a generic IMAP/SMTP account), we sync and store the contents of that mailbox: messages, subjects, senders and recipients, attachments, labels/folders, and drafts. We also store the OAuth tokens (or, for IMAP, the credentials you provide) needed to keep the connection alive; these are encrypted at rest. Purpose: providing the mail features you signed up for — inbox, search, compose, triage, drafts, scheduled send.

Contacts

With your permission, we sync your provider address book (e.g. Google Contacts and Gmail's auto-curated "Other contacts") and maintain contact profiles built from your mail. Contact email addresses and display names are also kept in a fast lookup index so the compose autocomplete responds instantly. Purpose: address autocomplete, contact management, and two-way contact sync with your provider.

Financial and bookkeeping data

If you use the bookkeeping side of Talisk, we store the business records you create or connect: bills, receipts and their images, invoices, quotes, jobs and time entries, clients and vendors, chart of accounts and journal entries, bank statements you upload, bank account and transaction data retrieved through Plaid when you connect a bank, and sales/payout data retrieved from ecommerce and payment platforms you connect (Shopify, WooCommerce, Square, PayPal, Stripe). If you connect Shopify, we also keep a copy of your store's product catalogue (product and variant names, SKUs, status and prices) so every product you sell can be listed in Talisk, including ones with no recent orders; it is deleted when the store is removed. Where your store grants Talisk access to its inventory records, we also read each product's cost, so your cost of goods sold can be booked. If you connect Shopify, we can also create a customer record in your store from contact details you have received, but only when you ask us to and only after you confirm the details. If you connect Stripe, Talisk can also show you your Stripe account's recent activity (payments, refunds, fees and payouts, with the customer name and email Stripe holds for each payment); it is read from Stripe when you open that screen and is not stored. Purpose: bookkeeping — capturing transactions, reconciliation, reports, and handover to your accountant.

Payment and billing information

Subscription payments are processed by Stripe. Talisk does not store your full card number or card verification code — those go directly to Stripe. We store your subscription tier, billing status, and Stripe's reference identifiers. Merchants who install Talisk HQ from the Shopify App Store are billed by Shopify instead, and we store the name of the Shopify plan and the store it belongs to. Purpose: billing for the Service.

Identity documents, if you ask us to restore your account

If you turn on two-factor authentication and then lose both your authenticator app and your recovery codes, or you can no longer open the email inbox you sign in with, the only way back into your account is for a person here to confirm who you are. That check asks you for a photograph of your government photo ID and a selfie holding up a number we give you. When you ask to move your account to a new email address, we also keep the new address you give us, encrypted, until 90 days after the decision. You are never asked for these at any other time, and never as a condition of using the Service. Both photographs are encrypted at rest with a key derived for your account, are seen only by a reviewing administrator, and are destroyed 90 days after the decision — we keep the record that you asked and what was decided, not the photographs. Purpose: confirming your identity before restoring access to your account.

Usage and technical data

Standard server logs (IP address, browser type, request timestamps), security events (sign-ins, failed attempts), and operational metrics such as AI feature usage counts. Purpose: keeping the Service secure, reliable, and within plan limits.

The public website counts visits itself, on our own servers: for each visit we record the site that referred you, the page you landed on and any campaign tag in the link, against a random identifier your browser keeps for the visit. No cookie is set, no IP address is stored (only a one-way hash of it) and nothing is shared with a third party. These records are deleted after 13 months. Purpose: learning which sites and posts bring people to Talisk.

The sign-in and sign-up screens run Cloudflare Turnstile, a check that tells a person from an automated script trying passwords. When those screens load, Cloudflare receives your IP address and browser and device signals in order to run the check; it receives no account content. Purpose: protecting accounts against password-guessing and fake sign-ups.

All traffic to the Service passes through Cloudflare's network on its way to our servers. Cloudflare sees your IP address and the requests and responses as they pass through, so that it can block attacks and abusive traffic, and forwards them to us over an encrypted connection. It processes that content in transit and does not keep it as account data. Purpose: keeping the Service available and protected against attacks.

If you take the guided tour of the live demo, we record which of its steps you reached and whether you finished it, against a random identifier your browser keeps for the tour. No account is attached and no IP address is stored (only a one-way hash of it, used to count distinct visitors). Your browser also remembers where you stopped, so the tour can offer to pick up where you left off. If you ask for access, from the tour or from the waitlist page, we keep the email address and what you tell us about your business so we can invite you. Purpose: seeing where the tour loses people, and inviting the people who ask.

When the Service hits an unexpected error, Talisk sends a crash report to Sentry (Functional Software, Inc.), an error-tracking service, so we can find and fix the cause. A report holds the error type and message, the technical trace of where in our software it happened, the page or API route and HTTP method being served, the software version, the time, and a short trail of what the server did just before (for example a call to a provider's API, with web addresses scrubbed). We remove personal data and credentials before a report leaves our servers: no request bodies, cookies, sign-in headers, IP addresses, variable values or user identifiers are sent, secret parts of web addresses are masked, and an email address that appears in an error message is replaced. Reports also come from the app running in your browser, when a page fails: these carry the error, the trace of where in our software it happened, the address of the page (with secret parts masked and anything after a question mark removed), your browser and operating system, and the list of pages you moved between just before. The same rules apply in the browser, and the report is scrubbed there before it is sent: no user identifiers, cookies or form contents, nothing written to the browser console, no content shown on the page beyond the error's own technical message (an error carrying a message from our servers, which is where the text of your emails and figures would come from, is not sent at all), no screen recording and no performance tracing. Sentry keeps reports for 30 days. Purpose: finding and fixing faults in the Service.

Cookies and local storage

We use only essential cookies (sign-in session, security tokens) and local browser storage for interface preferences. We run no third-party analytics or advertising trackers. See the Cookie & Tracking Notice. Purpose: keeping you signed in and remembering your settings.

Passwords saved in the desktop app

On a Mac, if you choose to save the password of a website you keep open as a tab in the desktop app, it is stored in that Mac's Keychain, on that computer only. It is never sent to us and we cannot read it. Remove it in Settings or in the Mac's Keychain. Purpose: signing you in to that website when you ask.

04How we use your information

• To provide the Service — syncing and displaying your mail, storing your books, generating reports, sending the email you tell us to send.
• To provide AI features you invoke or enable — inbox triage, drafting assistance, document extraction (e.g. reading a receipt), and the bookkeeping assistant. See section 6.
• To operate your account — verification emails, password resets, security notices, billing.
• To secure the Service — detecting abuse, enforcing isolation between accounts, auditing data integrity.
• To comply with law — where we are legally required to retain or disclose information.

We do not use your information for advertising, we do not sell or rent it, and we do not use your content to train AI models (ours or anyone else's — see sections 5 and 6).

05Google & Microsoft account data

When you connect a Google or Microsoft mailbox, Talisk requests only the permissions it needs to act as your email client and contact manager. What each permission is used for:

Google permissions

Microsoft permissions

Google API Services — Limited Use disclosure

In particular, for all data obtained through Google APIs:

• We use it only to provide and improve the user-facing features of Talisk that you see and interact with — mail, contacts, triage, drafting, and bookkeeping capture. We do not use it for any other purpose.
• We do not transfer it to anyone else, except as necessary to provide those features (see sections 6 and 7), to comply with applicable law, or with your explicit consent.
• Humans do not read this data, except with your explicit consent for specific messages, where necessary for security purposes (such as investigating abuse), to comply with applicable law, or where the data has been aggregated and anonymized for internal operations.
• We do not use it for serving advertisements, and we never sell it.
• We do not use it to train generalized artificial-intelligence or machine-learning models. Our AI provider is contractually prohibited from training its models on it (section 6).

06AI processing

Talisk's AI features — inbox triage, reply drafting, receipt and bill extraction, and the bookkeeping assistant — are powered by Anthropic's Claude models via Anthropic's API. When you use these features, the relevant content (for example, the email being triaged, the receipt being read, or the ledger figures the assistant is asked about) is sent to Anthropic PBC (United States) to generate the result, then returned to you.

• No training: under Anthropic's commercial terms, Anthropic does not use content submitted through its API to train its models.
• Limited retention: Anthropic does not retain API conversation content by default; narrow exceptions exist (for example, content flagged by Anthropic's automated trust-and-safety systems, or where retention is required by law).
• Output is assistance, not judgment: AI output can be wrong. Talisk's money-affecting AI suggestions are drafts that you review and approve.

07Service providers and connected services

We use a small number of service providers ("sub-processors") to run Talisk — hosting, AI, payments, transactional email, error tracking, and the sign-in bot check. Separately, when you connect a third-party service (your mailbox, your bank via Plaid, your store), data flows between Talisk and that service at your direction, under that service's own terms.

When you connect a bank, Plaid Inc. collects and processes your bank login and account data under its own End User Privacy Policy, and you agree to that when you use Plaid's connection window. Talisk receives only the account, balance and transaction data needed to do your bookkeeping, and you can disconnect at any time from Talisk or at my.plaid.com.

The current list, what each one does, and where it is located is published at taliskhq.com/subprocessors. We update that page when the list changes.

08Where your data is stored

Talisk's servers are hosted with DigitalOcean in the United States (Santa Clara, California). Documents you upload — receipts, bills, invoices and email attachments — are stored encrypted in DigitalOcean's object storage, in a United States region (San Francisco), as are our encrypted backups. Some service providers listed at taliskhq.com/subprocessors also process data in the United States.

Communication of information outside Quebec and outside Canada: if you are in Quebec (or elsewhere in Canada), your personal information is communicated to, stored in, and processed in the United States as described above. Before choosing these providers we assessed the sensitivity of the information, the purposes of the processing, and the protections applied (encryption at rest and in transit, contractual commitments, and the isolation measures described on our Security page), and concluded the information receives adequate protection. While in the United States, information may be subject to lawful access requests by U.S. authorities.

09Security

Security measures are described in detail on our Security page. In short: every account's data lives in its own isolated database schema with row-level security enforced by the database engine itself; personal content is encrypted at rest with a per-account key; connections are encrypted in transit (TLS); nightly database backups are GPG-encrypted before leaving the server; and payment card data is handled by Stripe, never stored by Talisk.

10Retention and deletion

• While your account is active, we retain your account data, mailbox data, and books so the Service can function. Bookkeeping records are retained for as long as you keep them in your books — they are your business records.
• Mailbox disconnection: disconnecting a mailbox stops syncing; revoking Talisk's access from your Google or Microsoft account settings cuts off Talisk's access immediately.
• Account deletion: you can delete your account and its data yourself, at any time, from Settings › Account › Delete my account and data, or by writing to privacy@taliskhq.com. Confirming locks the account at once. Seven days later its database schema — mail, contacts, books, and documents — is erased from the live service, unless you sign in before then and choose Keep my account. We also disconnect your mailboxes, bank feeds and stores and end your subscription at that point. An app you installed in a store (Shopify, Square) stays installed there until you remove it in the store's own admin; we delete our access keys. Before you confirm you can download your books and documents; businesses must generally keep their records for six years.
• Account-recovery photographs: the government ID and selfie described in section 03, and the new email address on a request to move your account, are destroyed 90 days after the decision on your request. The record that a request was made and what was decided is kept as part of your account's security history.
• Error reports: the crash reports described in section 03 are kept by Sentry for 30 days and then deleted.
• Backups: once your data is removed from the live service after the 7-day window, copies can remain in our backups for a limited time. Encrypted database backups expire within 90 days, and monthly full-server snapshots can hold it for up to 12 months, after which they expire too. Uploaded documents are separately mirrored to encrypted off-site storage, and that mirror is additive: it has no scheduled expiry of its own. Closing your account removes your documents from that mirror as well as from the live service: from the live service when the account is erased, and from the mirror 12 months later, once the last backup that could still hold your account has expired. Two details to know. Deleting a single document while your account stays open removes it from the live service only; the encrypted copy in the mirror remains until the account itself is closed, and then for the 12 months described above. And a small number of documents stored before August 2026 are filed under storage locations that do not identify an individual account, so they cannot be removed that way.
• What we may keep: records we are legally required to keep (for example, billing and tax records of our own, including the payment history our payment processor holds), kept only as long as the law requires; counts of the AI usage your account incurred, which carry no content; and, where you worked in someone else's books as their bookkeeper or partner, that owner's own audit trail of the changes, which keeps the record that a former collaborator made them but not your IP address.

11Your rights

Subject to the exceptions in applicable law, you have the right to:

• Access the personal information we hold about you and be told how it is used and to whom it has been communicated.
• Correct information that is inaccurate, incomplete, or out of date.
• Delete your information (see section 10).
• Portability: receive computerized personal information you provided to us in a structured, commonly used technological format. Talisk's export tools (CSV and accountant handover exports) cover most of this directly.
• Withdraw consent at any time — for example by disconnecting a mailbox or integration, or closing your account. Withdrawal does not affect processing that happened before it.

To exercise any of these rights, contact the Privacy Officer at privacy@taliskhq.com. We respond within 30 days. We may need to verify your identity before acting on a request.

If you are not satisfied with our response, you may complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia, or — in Quebec — the Commission d'accès à l'information du Québec.

12Breach notification

If a confidentiality incident involving your personal information creates a real risk of significant harm (or, for Quebec residents, a risk of serious injury), we will notify you and the applicable regulator (the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and/or the Commission d'accès à l'information du Québec) as required by law, keep a register of the incident, and take reasonable measures to reduce the risk of harm.

13Children

Talisk is a business tool. It is not directed at minors, and you must be at least 19 to use it. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under that age; if you believe a minor has provided us information, contact privacy@taliskhq.com and we will delete it.

14Marketing communications

We send transactional email that the Service requires — verification, password resets, security and billing notices. If we send commercial electronic messages (product news, offers), we do so in compliance with Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL): only with your consent, identifying ourselves, and with a working unsubscribe that we honour promptly. Unsubscribing from marketing never affects transactional email.

15Changes to this policy

When we change this policy, we will update the "Last updated" date above; for material changes we will notify you in the app or by email before the change takes effect. The current version always lives at taliskhq.com/privacy.

16Contact

Privacy questions and requests: privacy@taliskhq.com
General support: support@taliskhq.com
Talisk Technologies Inc., British Columbia, Canada. A postal address for formal notices is available on request from legal@taliskhq.com.