Two different people read this page, and they need two different answers. Start with which one you are.
If you messaged a business that uses Tephlo, that business decides what happens to your data — we hold it on their instructions. Ask them, and they can erase you from their dashboard straight away. If you cannot reach them, write to us at hello@tephlo.com and we will pass the request on and follow up.
If you run a Tephlo workspace, you can erase any individual yourself from Privacy Center, and you can close the whole workspace, which removes everything in it.
Tephlo is used by businesses to answer their own customers. That makes two groups of people whose data we hold for entirely different reasons, and the route to erasure is different for each. The Privacy Policy explains the split in full; the short version is that for customer conversations the business is the controller and we are its processor, and for workspace accounts we are the controller.
Ask that business. They can erase you immediately from their dashboard, without contacting us, and they do not need our permission — that is how it is meant to work, because the conversation is theirs.
If you do not know who they are, cannot reach them, or would rather not contact them, write to hello@tephlo.com with the phone number, Telegram user id, web session or API customer id you used, and which business you were messaging. We will identify the workspace, pass the request to them, and tell you what happened. We will not erase a business’s records on our own initiative, because we are not the ones who decided to collect them — but we will not let a request go unanswered either.
You do not need an account with us to make this request, and there is no charge for it.
Two different things, depending on what you want gone.
One person’s data. Open Privacy in your dashboard, find the customer, and confirm the deletion by re-typing their exact identifier. The re-typing is deliberate: erasure cannot be undone, and a mistyped identifier would otherwise silently erase the wrong person or nobody at all. The same screen exports their data if you need to give them a copy first.
The entire workspace. Ask us to close it. That removes the workspace and everything held for it — conversations, customers, knowledge, catalogue, media and staff accounts. Your channel connections are released, so your WhatsApp Business account and telephone number remain yours and can be connected elsewhere.
Deleting one person is not a flag on a row. For that identity we remove the conversation history and message content, the customer profile and anything remembered about them, support tickets and structured care cases, customer-scoped cached answers and review excerpts, and the live session state held outside the database. It also removes Smart Updates consent and send history, saved carts and their lines, potential-order requests, appointments, and related delivery records and unsent drafts. Export and erasure have different inventories: operational records can be erased without being separately included in the customer export.
Erasure also takes a lock on that identity while it runs. Anything already in flight either lands before the deletion and is removed with everything else, or arrives afterwards and is refused. There is no window in which a message slips in behind an erasure and quietly recreates the person.
A record that a deletion happened: when, which workspace, on whose authority, and the stated reason. It holds no message content and no readable identifier — the subject is stored as a keyed digest, so the record proves the erasure occurred without preserving the person it was about.
That record exists because an erasure you cannot demonstrate is not much use to anybody: it is what lets a business show a regulator, or you, that your request was carried out. Deleting it would remove the only evidence that your data was deleted.
Backups are another exception. A completed erasure removes the covered live records. A backup made before that request can retain a copy until it is pruned under the deployment’s backup schedule. The operator must reapply erasures when restoring a backup; the live erasure action does not edit old backup files.
A successful dashboard erasure removes the covered database records as part of that operation. External storage cleanup can require a worker; its completion depends on that worker running. A request that comes to us and has to be routed to a business depends on them; we acknowledge within a few working days and chase if they do not act. Where the law that applies to you sets a deadline, that deadline governs and we work to it.
If you reached this page from Facebook or WhatsApp settings, you are probably trying to remove data associated with a Meta login. Tephlo uses Meta sign-in only so a business can connect its own WhatsApp Business account to us; we do not build profiles from it and we do not receive your Facebook friends, posts or activity.
Disconnecting Tephlo from a WhatsApp Business account revokes our access to it. To have the associated records erased as well, use the route in section 2 or 3 above, or write to us — either reaches the same people.
General questions about this document go to hello@tephlo.com. Questions about personal data, including requests from individuals, should go to the data protection contact at [DATA PROTECTION CONTACT]; until that address is published, the general address above reaches the same team.
Postal address: [REGISTERED COMPANY NAME], [REGISTERED ADDRESS].
TEPHLO AI ENTERPRISES is the operator of Tephlo. If you are unhappy with how a request was handled you can complain to the Nigeria Data Protection Commission (NDPC), and if your own country has a different authority you may complain to that one instead. Written requests can also be sent to our registered address, which is on the Privacy Policy.
Effective from [EFFECTIVE DATE].