Agent MEL

Privacy Policy

Last updated 19 August 2026

Agent MEL is a workspace for organisations doing monitoring, evaluation, and learning. You connect your own data, ask questions about it, and produce reports and indicators. This policy explains what we hold, why we hold it, and who else touches it.

This policy covers the Agent MEL service. It does not cover anything you do on the third-party services you choose to connect.

Who is responsible for your data

We are the data user for the account and usage data described below. For the content you upload into your organisation's workspace, we act on your organisation's behalf: your organisation decides what goes in and what comes out, and we only handle it to run the service.

What we collect

  • Account data. Your email address, an optional display name, and your password (stored only as a hash by our authentication provider). We never see your password.
  • Organisation data. The organisations you belong to, your role in each (owner, admin, or member), and when you joined.
  • Content you provide. Files you upload (spreadsheets, documents, PDFs), links to external sources such as Google Sheets or Forms, and the data pulled from them; tags, funders, programmes, and context notes; reports, indicators, and other artefacts you generate or edit.
  • Conversations.The chats you have with the assistant, including your messages, the assistant's replies, and the sources and artefacts attached to each thread.
  • Derived data. Vector embeddings and extracted text computed from your content so it can be searched and cited, plus records of background jobs and in-app notifications.
  • Technical and usage data. Session cookies used to keep you signed in, a cookie storing your light/dark theme preference, and server logs (including IP address and request metadata) kept for security and reliability.

Any usage data we collect is used strictly to improve the product experience — understanding which features are used, where they fail, and what needs fixing. We do not use it for advertising, we do not sell it, and we do not run third-party ad or tracking scripts on the service.

Why we use it

  • To authenticate you and keep your session active.
  • To store, parse, index, and display the content you put into your workspace.
  • To answer your questions: your messages and the relevant parts of attached sources are sent to a large language model, and generated analysis code is executed against your data in an isolated sandbox.
  • To run background work you have asked for — syncing sources, processing uploads, recomputing indicators on a schedule.
  • To keep the service secure, debug failures, and prevent abuse.
  • To improve the product experience.

Sending data to AI models

Answering your questions requires sending part of your workspace content to a large language model. Before we do, we strip personally identifiable information from the material we send. The exception is what you type yourself: if you include personal details in a message, or ask a question that requires the model to see them, they are sent as you wrote them. Please avoid putting personal data about staff, partners, or beneficiaries into your messages unless the analysis genuinely needs it.

Content sent to a model is used to produce your answer and nothing else. We do not use your content to train models.

Google API User Data & Limited Use Disclosure

Agent MEL's use and transfer to any other app of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. We do not transfer this data to third parties except as required to provide and improve the service, nor do we use it for serving advertisements or training AI models.

Who we share it with and why

We do not sell your data and we do not share it for advertising. We disclose it only on a need-to-know basis, under contracts that limit what recipients may do with it, to the following categories of recipient:

  • Cloud infrastructure and hosting providers — to host the application, run the database, store your uploaded files, and provide authentication.
  • AI model providers— to generate the assistant's responses, on the terms set out above.
  • Sandboxed compute providers — to run generated analysis code against your data in isolation.
  • Professional advisers — lawyers, auditors, and similar, where needed and under a duty of confidence.
  • Regulators, courts, and law enforcement — where we are legally required to disclose, or where disclosure is necessary to protect the rights and safety of users and the public.

We will tell you the identity of any current provider on request, at the address below.

Where your data is held

Your data resides in the jurisdiction in which we operate. We currently operate only in the Hong Kong SAR, and your data is held there. If we begin operating elsewhere, and that would mean holding your data in another jurisdiction, we will update this policy and notify you before the change takes effect.

How long we keep it, and deletion

Workspace content is kept while your organisation is using the service. You or an organisation admin can delete content in the app at any time; deleting a source or a conversation also removes the material derived from it — extracted text, embeddings, and attachments.

You may also request deletion of your data by writing to us. We will complete the deletion within 30 days of the request, across our live systems and our backups. We will confirm once it is done. Where the law requires us to retain something (for example, records we must keep for a fixed period), we will tell you what we kept and why.

Security

Access to your organisation's data is scoped to its members and enforced in the database itself, so a signed-in user cannot read another organisation's records. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Uploaded files are stored in a private bucket and served only through short-lived, signed links. No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

Hong Kong: your rights under the PDPO

We handle personal data in accordance with the Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance (Cap. 486) and its six Data Protection Principles: we collect personal data lawfully and only what is necessary; we keep it accurate and no longer than needed; we use it only for the purposes set out in this policy, or a directly related purpose, unless you consent otherwise; we take practicable steps to keep it secure; we are open about our practices; and we honour your rights of access and correction.

Under Data Protection Principle 6 and sections 18, 22, and 38 of the Ordinance, you have the right to ask whether we hold personal data about you, to be given a copy of it, and to have inaccurate data corrected. Send a data access or correction request to the address below. We will respond within 40 days, as the Ordinance requires. We may charge a fee for complying with a data access request, but it will not be excessive; we will tell you the amount before we proceed.

We do not use your personal data in direct marketing, and we do not provide it to anyone else for their direct marketing, without your consent.

If you are not satisfied with how we have handled your data, you may complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data, Hong Kong (pcpd.org.hk).

If you are outside Hong Kong, you may have additional rights under your local law — such as portability, erasure, or objection to processing. Write to us and we will honour them where they apply.

Children

The service is not intended for children under 16, and we do not knowingly collect their personal data. Note that data about beneficiaries, including children, may appear in the content an organisation uploads; that content is the organisation's responsibility.

Changes

We will update this policy as the service changes. If a change matters to you, we will say so in the app before it takes effect. The date at the top always reflects the current version.

Contact

Questions, data access or correction requests, deletion requests, or complaints: legal@nous.life.