Data Deletion Instructions

1. What this page is

Salaf LLC runs Shopdesk, whose support inbox some businesses use to answer their customers, on Facebook Messenger, on Instagram, on WhatsApp, and through the chat widget on their online shops. If you have messaged one of those businesses — or one of them has messaged you on WhatsApp — this page tells you how to have what we hold about that conversation deleted.

2. What we hold

For a Messenger chat: the identifier Meta issues for you on that business’s Page, the messages in the thread, any images you sent, and the name and profile picture Meta shows for you. For a chat on a shop’s widget: your messages, any images you were invited to upload, the page you were on, your IP address, an approximate city, and a short browser label.

For an Instagram chat: the identifier Meta uses for you in Instagram messages, the messages in the thread, any photos, videos, voice messages and files you sent, your Instagram name and username, a link to your profile picture, and whether you follow the business’s account. For a story you replied to, mentioned the business in or shared, we hold only Instagram’s link to it — never the story itself.

For a WhatsApp chat: the identifier WhatsApp issues for you for that business, your phone number if WhatsApp shared it, your WhatsApp username if you have one, your WhatsApp profile name, the messages in the thread — including replies the business sent from its WhatsApp Business app, and chats it started with you from there — any photos, videos, voice messages, stickers and files you sent, a location, contact card or cart you shared, and whether the business’s messages to you were delivered and read.

The full description is in our Privacy Policy.

3. Automatic deletion — you may not need to do anything

A conversation, all of its messages and all of the images stored from it are deleted 180 days after the last message in it. That happens on its own, with no request from you and no action available to the business — and it happens whether or not the business marked the chat as resolved.

So if you last messaged the business more than six months ago, the conversation is already gone. Everything below is for when you want it gone sooner.

3A. On Instagram, unsending a message deletes it here too

You can remove a single Instagram message yourself, without writing to anyone: unsend it in the Instagram app. Meta tells us, and we delete the message’s text and any file stored from it, along with any copy of it in the business’s conversation list or in a saved AI summary of the chat. In its place the thread keeps a line saying that a message was unsent, with the time it was sent and Instagram’s reference number for it, but not its words. If a stored file cannot be deleted straight away, nothing in the inbox links to it any more, and it goes with the conversation’s automatic deletion in §3. The privacy policy (§3A) describes the rare cases where an unsent message is kept, and §6 below covers a copy left in a failed processing job.

That works whenever Meta sends us the notice, including for a conversation the business kept after disconnecting Instagram from Shopdesk. If the business has disconnected its whole Facebook Page from Shopdesk, we can no longer count on receiving it; the automatic deletion in §3 still applies, and so does asking us under §4.

Unsending is the only thing you can do in the Instagram app that makes us delete anything. To have a whole conversation deleted, ask us under §4. And if the business disconnects Instagram from Shopdesk, the conversations it already received are not deleted by that: they stay in its inbox, read-only, until the automatic deletion in §3 or a request under §4 removes them.

3B. On WhatsApp, deleting a message for everyone deletes it here too

If you delete a WhatsApp message for everyone, Meta tells us, and we delete it the same way as an unsent Instagram message (§3A): its text and any file stored from it go, and in its place the thread keeps a line saying that a message was deleted, with the time it was sent and WhatsApp’s reference number for it, but not its words. If a stored file cannot be deleted straight away, it is handled as §3A describes. Deleting a message only for yourself, or deleting the chat on your phone, does not reach us.

That is the only thing you can do in WhatsApp that makes us delete anything, and it works only while the business has WhatsApp connected to Shopdesk: once it disconnects, we no longer receive these notices. To have a whole conversation deleted, ask us under §4. If the business disconnects WhatsApp from Shopdesk, the conversations it already received are not deleted by that: they stay in its inbox, read-only, until the automatic deletion in §3 or a request under §4 removes them.

4. How to ask us to delete it now

Email support@shopdeskbd.com with:

• the name on your Facebook profile, or the name you gave in the chat;
• which business or Page you messaged;
• roughly when — a month is enough.

The business name is the part we genuinely cannot do without, and it is worth explaining why rather than just asking for it. Each business’s conversations are stored separately from every other business’s, and the identifier Facebook gives us for you is specific to the Page you messaged — it is not your Facebook account, and it does not let us search across businesses. A profile name on its own does not tell us whose inbox to look in.

If it was an Instagram chat, give us your Instagram username (your @handle) instead of a profile name, and the business’s Instagram account you messaged. The business matters for the same reason: its conversations are stored apart from every other business’s, and a username on its own does not tell us whose inbox to look in.

If it was a WhatsApp chat, give us the phone number you use on WhatsApp — or your WhatsApp username, if you have hidden your number — instead of a profile name, and the business’s name or the WhatsApp number you messaged, or that messaged you. We look for your number or username in that business’s inbox, and from your chat we find the WhatsApp user ID Meta issued for you there, which is how the rest of what we hold about you at that business is found.

5. What gets deleted

• The conversation and every message in it, on the business’s side as well as yours — once it is deleted, nobody at that business can read it either.
• Every image stored from that conversation, removed from our file storage.
• The channel identity record — the small row that links your messaging ID to a customer record at that shop. This one is easy to overlook and it is the reason a deletion can otherwise undo itself: leave it in place and the next message you send is quietly re-attached to the same customer record, as though nothing had been deleted.
• For an Instagram chat, all of the above — and with the conversation go the link to your profile picture and the links to any stories, while every video, voice message and file stored from it is removed from our file storage along with the images.
• For a WhatsApp chat, all of the above — the replies the business sent from its WhatsApp Business app go with the conversation, and every video, voice message and file stored from it is removed from our file storage along with the images.

6. What may remain, and why

We would rather tell you this plainly than promise more than we do.

• Orders you actually placed with the business. An order is that business’s own commercial record — it usually has to keep it for tax and accounting — and it is not ours to delete on request. Ask the business directly about its own records.
• Internal usage records that reference a conversation by its ID. Where a business used an AI feature on a chat, we keep a cost-and-usage entry that records that something ran, when, and how much it cost. Those entries hold no message text and no name — after the deletion, what is left is a bookkeeping line pointing at an ID that no longer refers to anything.
• Server access logs. As described in §9 of the privacy policy, our web servers write an ordinary access line for every request. Those files rotate on their own as new ones fill up, they hold no message content, and no business can read them.
• A copy inside a failed processing job. Messages from Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp pass through a short-lived work queue on the way in. A job that completes is removed at once, but one that failed keeps its copy until the queue clears old failures — described under “How long it is kept” in §3A of the privacy policy. We do not search that queue by hand as part of a deletion. It holds nothing a business can see.
• The chat inside Instagram itself. We delete our copy; nothing we do removes the conversation from Instagram. The copy in your Instagram app and in the business’s is Instagram’s, not ours, and Instagram’s own controls — such as unsending a message — are how you change it there.
• The chat inside WhatsApp itself. We delete our copy; nothing we do removes the chat from WhatsApp — not from your phone, and not from the business’s WhatsApp Business app if it uses one on the same number. Those copies live on your phone and on the business’s own phone or the computers linked to it. WhatsApp’s own controls, such as deleting a message for everyone, are how you change them, and what WhatsApp itself does with your messages is covered by its Privacy Policy. For the business’s copy, ask the business (§8).
• The channel identity record, until you ask — the automatic 180-day deletion does not take it. This is the row in §5, and it is listed twice on purpose. The automatic clean-up in §3 removes the conversation, its messages and its images; it leaves this record in place, because it belongs to the business’s customer record rather than to the chat. So six months after your last message the conversation is gone and the link between your messaging ID and that shop’s customer record is not. Asking under §4 is what removes it — that is the difference between waiting and asking, and it is the main one.

7. How long it takes

Within 30 days of a request we have been able to verify. We will confirm by email when it is done. If we cannot work out which conversation you mean, we will write back and ask rather than guess — deleting the wrong person’s chat would be its own privacy failure.

8. Telling the business as well

You can raise it with the business you messaged, and it is worth being precise about what that does and does not achieve. There is no delete button in their inbox — the software gives them no way to remove a conversation themselves. What they can do is pass your request to us, and they are required to: our terms with every business oblige them to honour a deletion request and to forward anything that concerns data we hold.

On WhatsApp, a business that deletes your chat in its WhatsApp Business app has deleted its own copy on its phone, not ours: the conversation stays in Shopdesk until it is deleted under §3 or at your request under §4.

So telling them is useful, and it is not a second, faster route. Every erasure runs through the same place — the address in §4 — and writing to us directly is the shorter path. Their own records of an order you placed are a separate matter, and those are theirs to answer for (§6).

9. Contact

support@shopdeskbd.com — for deletion requests, and for anything else about how we handle your data.