Privacy Policy

Merkat — merkatai.com Effective date: 14 August 2026

This policy explains what happens to your personal information when you visit our website. It is written in plain English on purpose. If anything in it is unclear, email us and we will explain it.

1. Who we are

Merkat is a product of Tide Spark Inc., a Canadian federal corporation, with its registered office c/o LaBarge Weinstein LLP, 501-321 Water Street, Vancouver, British Columbia V6B 1B8, Canada.

In this policy, "we", "us" and "our" mean Tide Spark Inc. "You" means a visitor to our website.

We are responsible for the personal information described in this policy. Under Canadian law we are the organisation accountable for it; under European and UK law we are the "controller".

How to reach us about privacy: hello@merkatai.com, or by post at the address above.

2. What this policy covers — and what it does not

This policy covers our website at merkatai.com: the pages you browse, the callback widget where you leave a phone number, the box where you describe what you want an agent to do, and any email you send us from the site.

This policy does not cover business data we handle for our customers. If your company becomes a Merkat customer, the information your agent works with — your price lists, documents, message threads, records about your own customers — is handled under the agreement your company signs with us and the separate data processing terms that go with it, not under this policy. If you are a customer and want to know how we handle your business data, look at your agreement or ask us for a copy.

This policy also does not cover other companies' websites that we link to. They have their own policies.

3. What we collect

We collect only what we need to talk to you. Specifically:

a. Your phone number, if you ask us to call you — and the call itself. Our site has a callback widget. If you type in a phone number and ask us to call, we collect that number, the time you asked, and anything else you choose to add.

The call is placed through Twilio, a communications provider, and a written summary of the conversation is produced afterwards and kept with our record of you. You will be told this at the start of the call, and if you would rather we did not, say so and we will stop. If you would like the summary of your call deleted, ask us and we will delete it.

b. What you type into the enquiry box. Our homepage has a free-text box where you can describe what you would like an AI agent to do for your business. We collect the text you write there. Please do not put sensitive details, passwords, or other people's personal information into that box — it is meant for a short description of what you need.

c. Your name, email address and anything else you send us. If you email us, fill in a contact form, or reply to us, we collect what you send, including your name, email address, and the contents of your message.

d. Basic technical information about your visit. Like almost every website, our servers keep logs. These record things like your IP address, the type of browser and device you are using, the pages you looked at, the time of your visit, and the page that sent you to us. We do not run an analytics tool and we do not track you across other websites.

That is the whole list. We do not ask you to create an account on the marketing site, we do not take payment on it, and we do not buy personal information about you from data brokers.

4. Why we use it

We use the information above to:

• call you back or reply to you, when you have asked us to;
• understand what you are looking for so the conversation is useful;
• follow up about our product, and keep a record of our conversations with you;
• keep the site working, secure, and free of abuse; and
• understand in general terms how the site is used, so we can improve it.

We do not sell your personal information. We do not share it with advertisers.

If you are in the EU, the EEA or the UK, the legal grounds we rely on are: your consent, when you deliberately give us a phone number or type a message asking us to get in touch; and our legitimate interests in responding to enquiries, running our business, and keeping our site secure. Where we rely on consent, you can withdraw it at any time — see section 8.

5. Who else sees it

We use other companies to run parts of our business. They only get what they need to do their job, and only to provide services to us. These include:

• hosting and infrastructure providers, which store the site and its logs;
• Twilio, which places the callback, and email providers which carry our messages;
• customer relationship and email tools, which hold our record of the conversation with you; and
• AI model providers. Our product is built on AI models supplied by third parties. That means text you type into the enquiry box may be sent to one of those providers to be processed. We choose providers whose terms do not allow them to use that text to train their general-purpose models, or we turn that option off where the provider offers the setting. We may change providers as the technology changes, so we do not name a specific one here; ask us and we will tell you who we use at the time.

We may also disclose personal information if we are required to by law, a court, or a regulator; if we need to in order to establish or defend a legal claim, or to protect someone's safety; or to a buyer or investor if our business is sold or reorganised, in which case the information stays subject to a policy like this one.

6. Where your information goes

We are in Canada, and our service providers may be in Canada, the United States, Europe, or elsewhere. That means your information may be stored or processed outside the country you live in, and may be accessible to the courts and authorities of those countries under their laws.

Where we move personal information out of the EEA or the UK, we use a transfer mechanism recognised under those laws, such as standard contractual clauses. Where we move personal information out of Malaysia, we do so on the grounds permitted by Malaysian law, including your consent and the need to take steps you have asked for.

7. How long we keep it

We keep personal information for as long as we need it for the purpose we collected it for — mainly, having and remembering a conversation with you — and then delete it or make it anonymous.

In practice: if you ask us to stop contacting you, we stop, and we keep only the minimum needed to make sure we do not contact you again by mistake. Server logs and analytics are kept for a short operational period and then discarded or aggregated. If you want your information deleted sooner, ask us — see section 8.

We have not set a fixed number of days for every category, and we would rather tell you that plainly than publish a number we do not keep to.

8. Your choices and your rights

You can ask us to:

• tell you what we hold about you, and give you a copy;
• correct anything that is wrong or out of date;
• delete what we hold, where we do not have a legal reason to keep it;
• stop contacting you, at any time, for any reason or none; and
• withdraw your consent, where we relied on it.

Email hello@merkatai.com and say what you want. We will ask you for enough information to be confident it is really you, and we will answer within the time the law allows — in Canada, within 30 days of your request, unless we tell you we need an extension and why.

If you are in the EU, the EEA or the UK, you also have the right to object to processing based on our legitimate interests, to ask us to restrict processing, and to receive certain information in a portable format.

Complaints. If you think we have got this wrong, tell us first and we will try to fix it. You can also complain to a regulator:

• in Canada, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (priv.gc.ca);
• in the EU or the EEA, your national data protection authority;
• in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk);
• in Malaysia, the Personal Data Protection Department (Jabatan Perlindungan Data Peribadi).

9. Cookies and similar technologies

This site sets no cookies. Not for advertising, not for analytics, not for tracking you across other websites. There is no consent banner because there is nothing to consent to.

One thing you should know: our pages load their typefaces from Google Fonts, which means your browser contacts a Google server and Google sees your IP address when you visit. We are moving those files onto our own servers so that stops happening. Until then, we would rather tell you than not.

10. Security

We take reasonable steps to protect the information we hold. Access to enquiries and callback requests is limited to the people at Merkat who need it. Information sent between your browser and our site travels over an encrypted connection, and our service providers are chosen in part on their security practices.

We are a small, young company, and we will not pretend otherwise: we hold no security certification, and no system connected to the internet is completely safe. If a breach happens that puts you at real risk of significant harm, we will report it as the law requires and tell you.

11. Children

This site is for people running or working in a business. It is not aimed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has sent us personal information, email us and we will delete it.

12. Automated decisions

We do not make decisions about you that produce legal or similarly significant effects using automated processing alone. A person reads your enquiry and a person calls you back.

13. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as our website and our business change. When we do, we will change the effective date at the top. If the change matters to you — for example, if we start collecting something new — we will make that clear on the site rather than quietly editing the page.

14. Contact us

Questions, requests, or complaints about privacy:

Email: hello@merkatai.com Post: Tide Spark Inc., c/o LaBarge Weinstein LLP, 501-321 Water Street, Vancouver, British Columbia V6B 1B8, Canada