Overview
This Privacy Policy explains how Automize LLC (“Abel,” “we,” “us,” or “our”), a Georgia limited liability company, collects, uses, shares, and protects personal information when you use our website at abelhq.com, our mobile apps, and our services (together, the “service”).
Abel lets service businesses use an AI phone agent that answers calls, books appointments into their calendar, and texts confirmations, along with a booking page, payments, a customer list, an inbox, and email tools to run the business.
Businesses and their customers
Abel has two kinds of users: businesses that subscribe to Abel (“business users”), and the people who call, book with, or pay those businesses (“customers”).
For information about a business’s customers — their calls, bookings, messages, and payments with that business — the business decides why and how that information is used and is responsible for it (it is the “controller” or “business” under privacy law). Abel processes that information on the business’s behalf, under the business’s instructions, to provide the service. If you are a customer and want to access, correct, or delete information a business holds about you, please contact that business directly. If you contact us instead, we will forward your request to the business and help it respond.
For information about business users, visitors to our own website, and customers who create an Abel account to manage their bookings, Abel is responsible for it as described in this policy.
Information we collect
We collect the following categories of information:
- Account information — name, email address, phone number, and sign-in details for business users and for customers who create an account.
- Business information — business name, type, hours, address, services, prices, logo, schedule, and phone number, plus the details needed to register the business for text messaging (see “Twilio” under Sharing).
- Customer & appointment data — customers’ names, phone numbers, email addresses, appointments, notes, text-message consent records, messages, and email threads created through the service.
- Call data — the phone number of each caller, the time and length of the call, and the audio and transcript of calls answered by the AI phone agent.
- Payment information — subscription billing details for business users, and the payments, deposits, tips, and saved cards customers use to pay businesses. Card numbers are collected and stored by Stripe; we receive only limited details such as the card brand, last four digits, and payment status.
- Connected Google account data — when a business user connects Google, the data described in Google user data.
- Device & usage data — IP address, browser and device type, operating system, pages viewed, and the actions taken in the app, plus error reports when something breaks. If you turn on notifications, we store the push subscription your browser or device gives us.
- Communications — what you send us when you email us or report a problem.
How we use it
We use the information we collect to:
- Provide and operate the service — answer calls, book and manage appointments, send confirmations and reminders, and process payments on a business's behalf
- Create and manage accounts and subscriptions, and process subscription payments
- Register businesses with phone carriers for text messaging and keep the records carriers require
- Provide customer support and respond to requests
- Understand how the service is used, fix problems, and improve it
- Keep the service secure, prevent fraud and abuse, and enforce our Terms
- Comply with law and respond to lawful requests
We do not sell personal information, and we do not use it for targeted advertising.
Email from businesses
A business that uses Abel can email the customers who gave it an email address: appointment emails, and news and offers such as openings, promotions, and announcements. Abel sends these on the business’s behalf, and each one names the business it comes from.
Every news or offers email has an unsubscribe link at the bottom. Unsubscribing stops news and offers from that business to that address; it does not affect other businesses on Abel. We do not sell email addresses or share them with anyone for their own marketing.
Notifications
A business that uses Abel can send notifications — appointment updates and reminders, and news and offers — to your phone or browser. They only arrive after you allow notifications on that device, and you can say no.
To stop them, turn notifications off for the site or app in your phone’s settings (or your browser’s settings on a computer). They stop on that device straight away.
AI features
Several features use AI models to process information on a business user’s behalf:
- AI phone agent — calls are handled by ElevenLabs, which converts speech to text, runs the conversation with a language model, speaks the agent’s replies, and produces the call audio and transcript.
- Agent setup — when a business sets up or previews its agent, the business details it provides are sent to a language model to draft the agent’s greeting, instructions, and personality.
- Reply drafts & follow-up emails — to draft email replies and automated follow-up emails, the relevant email thread and customer details are sent to a language model. Drafts are shown to the business to review or are sent according to the business’s automation settings.
- Contact import — when a business imports a spreadsheet of customers, only the column headers and summary statistics about each column — not the customers’ details — are sent to a language model to suggest how the columns map.
Apart from the phone agent, these requests are routed through the Vercel AI Gateway to model providers including Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepSeek, and Alibaba (Qwen). We send AI providers only what a feature needs, only to deliver the feature you asked for. We do not use your data, or your customers’ data, to train AI models.
Google user data
If you connect your Google account, Abel requests only the scopes needed for the features you use. With your consent we access:
- Google Calendar events (
calendar.events) — to write appointments booked through Abel to your calendar and read your events so already-busy times are blocked from your booking availability. - Gmail (
gmail.modify,gmail.send) — to import customer email into your Abel inbox, apply labels and read state, draft replies you can review, and send email on your behalf from your business address. - Basic profile (
openid,email,profile) — to identify the connected account.
We access only the connected account’s own data, only to provide these features, and only while the connection is active. To draft a reply, the content of the relevant email thread is sent to an AI model provider (see AI features) solely to generate that draft for you. Access and refresh tokens are encrypted at rest (AES-256-GCM) and are never sold or shared for advertising. You can disconnect Google at any time from Dashboard → Integrations, which revokes our access and deletes the stored tokens.
Data retention
We keep personal information for as long as the account it belongs to is active and as needed to provide the service. When you disconnect Google, we delete the stored tokens immediately. When you delete your account (Dashboard → Settings → Account, or by emailing us), we delete your account and the business data tied to it from our database right away, and remaining copies — in backups and at our subprocessors — are deleted within 90 days of the deletion request, unless the law requires us to keep something longer (for example, payment and tax records, or text-message consent records carriers require).
Information a business holds about its customers is kept for as long as the business keeps it in Abel, and is deleted when the business deletes it or closes its account, on the same schedule.
Security
We use technical and organizational measures to protect your information against unauthorized access, alteration, disclosure, or destruction, including encryption in transit, encryption of sensitive credentials at rest, and access controls. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, but we work to protect your data and continuously improve our safeguards.
Your rights
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, export, or delete your personal information, and to withdraw consent for optional processing such as connected integrations or notifications. You can update most information and delete your account yourself in the app. For anything else, email contact@abelhq.com. If your request is about information a business holds about you as its customer, see Businesses and their customers.
US state privacy rights
If you live in California (under the CCPA, as amended by the CPRA) or in another US state with a comprehensive privacy law, you have the right to:
- Know what personal information we collect, use, and disclose, and access a copy of it
- Delete personal information we collected from you
- Correct inaccurate personal information
- Receive your personal information in a portable format
- Opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information and of targeted advertising — we do not sell or share personal information, or use it for targeted advertising, and we treat Global Privacy Control signals as a valid opt-out
- Not be discriminated against for exercising any of these rights
The categories of information we collect, where it comes from, why we use it, and who we disclose it to are described above. We do not use sensitive personal information to infer characteristics about you, and we do not knowingly sell or share the personal information of anyone under 16.
To make a request, email contact@abelhq.com. We will verify your request by matching it to the email address or phone number on the account. You can use an authorized agent; we may ask for proof that the agent is authorized and ask you to confirm your identity. We respond within 45 days, and may extend that once by another 45 days where the law allows, telling you why. If we decline your request, you can appeal by replying to our decision or emailing us with “Appeal” in the subject; we will respond to an appeal within the time your state’s law requires, and if you are not satisfied you may contact your state attorney general.
EEA & UK
Abel is built for businesses in the United States. If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, we process your personal information on these legal bases: to perform our contract with you (to provide the service), our legitimate interests (to secure, support, and improve the service, where those interests are not overridden by yours), your consent (for example, for optional integrations and notifications, which you can withdraw at any time), and to comply with legal obligations.
You have the rights to access, rectify, erase, restrict, and port your data, and to object to processing based on legitimate interests. You can also complain to your local data protection authority. Your information is processed and stored in the United States, where our servers and subprocessors are located; where required, transfers rely on safeguards such as the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses or the UK equivalent.
Children's privacy
Abel is a service for businesses and is not directed to children. It is not intended for anyone under 16, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child has given us personal information, email contact@abelhq.com and we will delete it.
Changes to this policy
We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will change the “Last updated” date above, and when we make material changes we will notify business users by email before they take effect.
Contact
If you have questions about this Privacy Policy or want to exercise your rights, contact Automize LLC at contact@abelhq.com. See also our Terms of Service and Refund Policy.