Security and privacy

Where your data goes, and what the AI actually does

Last updated 18 October 2026. Written for the person who has to approve this: an office manager, a board, an IT contractor.

Short version: the assistant answers only from the pages and PDFs you choose on your own website, nothing private ever leaves your site, visitors’ questions are not kept, and nothing is used to train AI models.

What the AI is

AskMyPages does not learn from your site or train anything on it. When a visitor asks a question, the service looks up the most relevant passages from your published pages and PDFs, hands those passages to an AI model (OpenAI’s) with the instruction to answer only from them, and shows the answer with links to the exact page or PDF page it came from. If your site does not cover something, it says so instead of guessing. The model has no access to anything beyond those passages: no internet, no other customers’ content, no tools.

What leaves your site, and what never does

Sent, because search needs it

Published, public pages and posts you tick: title, address, text, category names
PDFs you select (the text is read; the file is not kept)
A visitor’s search terms or chat question, when they ask
The plugin’s version number, so we can warn about old versions

Never sent

Members, users, email addresses, logins or passwords
Drafts, private or password-protected pages
Comments, form submissions, custom fields, orders
Server details or your list of plugins
Cookies or anything that identifies a visitor

Where it goes and how long it stays

Data	Where	Kept for
Published pages and posts you tick (title, address, text, category names)	Our database; the text also goes to OpenAI to be indexed and to answer	While the site is connected. Deleted when you disconnect.
PDFs you select from your Media Library	Our server reads the text; the file itself is not kept	Text: while connected. File: not stored.
A visitor's search terms	Our service, to find results; OpenAI, to understand meaning	Cached briefly for speed; not tied to a person.
A visitor's chat question and the answer	Our service and OpenAI, with the matching passages from your site	The conversation is kept 30 minutes for follow-ups, then deleted. Answers may be cached for a day so the same question costs nothing twice.
A visitor's network address	Our service only, as a one-way hash, to apply the daily question limit	One day. The address itself is never stored.
Your account (email, plan, billing)	Our database; card details stay with Stripe and never reach us	While you have an account.

Two companies help us run the service and see data: OpenAI (search understanding, answers, and a safety check on questions and answers; under its API terms the data is not used to train models and is kept only briefly for abuse monitoring) and Stripe (payments; we never see card numbers). Cloudflare sits in front of our servers and sees traffic the way any network provider does.

Visitors’ privacy

Nothing is sent until a visitor actually types a question or a search.
No cookies. The chat remembers the conversation in the browser tab only (session storage) and forgets it when the tab closes.
We do not know who the visitor is: no accounts, no names, no tracking.
A conversation is kept for 30 minutes so follow-up questions work, then deleted.
To stop abuse, a one-way hash of the visitor’s network address is kept for one day. The address itself is never stored.
You decide who sees the chat: everyone, logged-in users only, or chosen roles.

Security

All traffic is encrypted (HTTPS, certificate verification never switched off).
Your site and our service talk through signed requests. The signing key is generated on your site and never leaves it; we hold only the public half.
The key visitors’ browsers use is read-only, tied to your domain and rate-limited, so it cannot be used from anywhere else or for anything but search and chat.
Every customer’s data is separated by account in the database, with row-level security as a second layer.
Indexed content is treated as data, never as instructions: the answer model cannot be told to do things by text on a web page.
The server is hardened: key-only access, no root login, firewall, automatic security updates, encrypted nightly backups.
Disconnecting the plugin revokes its keys and deletes your content from our index.

What stays in your hands

Which content types are included, which categories are left out, and a “leave this out” box on every page, post and PDF.
Whether the search upgrade and the chat are on at all; both switch off from the WordPress admin in one click.
Who can see the chat.
Spending caps, so a busy month never becomes a surprise bill.

Straight answers

Is our content used to train AI models?: No. Not by us, and not by OpenAI: content and questions go to OpenAI through its API, whose terms exclude training on that data. The assistant does not "learn" from your site; it looks passages up every time and answers from them.
Can the assistant make things up?: It is instructed to answer only from the passages retrieved from your site and to say when your site does not cover something, and every answer links to the page or PDF page it came from so anyone can check. Like any AI it can still phrase something imperfectly; the citations are there so a mistake is caught in one click rather than trusted.
Where are the servers?: The service runs on a dedicated server we rent from OVH, behind Cloudflare, with encrypted nightly backups. OpenAI processes text in the United States. If you need the service to run in a particular region, ask: a dedicated instance is possible on our larger plans.
Can we run it on our own servers?: Not today. AskMyPages is a hosted service; that is what keeps it a one-minute setup with no keys to manage. A dedicated, single-customer instance in a region of your choice is available on request for larger organisations.
What about member-only or confidential pages?: Leave them out. The plugin never sends private, password-protected or draft content, and you choose which content types and categories are included. AskMyPages is built for public information: agreements, handbooks, policies, FAQs. We advise against pointing it at anything sensitive.
Do you have SOC 2 or ISO 27001?: Not yet. Hook & Plug is a small company (Shipalu LLC, Virginia). What we can offer today is this page, the privacy policy, a data-processing agreement on request, and straight answers to any question your IT person has.
Is it compatible with GDPR and similar laws?: We act as your processor for your site content and your visitors’ questions, and we keep the minimum: no cookies, no visitor accounts, no stored network addresses, conversations deleted after 30 minutes. A data-processing agreement is available on request; OpenAI provides its own for API customers.
What happens if we cancel or disconnect?: Disconnecting the plugin (or deleting it) revokes its keys and deletes your content from our index. Your account stays until you ask us to delete it. Nothing changes on your own site: search goes back to normal WordPress search.
What if the service is down?: Your site keeps working. The search box falls back to normal WordPress search automatically and the chat button is simply absent; nothing on your site depends on us being up.

Still have a question?

Email [email protected] and a person who built the service answers, usually the same day. The full privacy policy and terms are here too, and the plugin’s WordPress.org listing lists every outside service it talks to.