Conversations and messages are stored in tables on your own site. That makes you the one who answers a data request, so it is worth knowing which tool covers which visitor.
Signed-in visitors
Sohay registers WordPress’s personal-data exporter and eraser. The standard flows include Sohay conversations automatically:
- Tools → Export Personal Data — their conversations are in the archive.
- Tools → Erase Personal Data — their conversations are erased with the rest.
Both match on the account’s email address. Nothing extra to configure.
Anonymous visitors
An anonymous visitor’s chat is not tied to an email address, so the email-based tools cannot find it. This is not an oversight — there is genuinely nothing to match on.
To erase one, open it under Sohay → Conversations and delete it. It leaves the inbox immediately and is permanently purged after the retention window, 30 days by default.
A visitor can also delete their own chat from the widget, which follows the same path.
Two practical consequences:
- To honour an erasure request from an anonymous visitor, you need to find the conversation. Search the inbox for something only they would have said. If you cannot identify it, you cannot erase it — and saying so is a more honest answer than pretending otherwise.
- “Erased” means purged after the window, not instantly gone from disk. Know the number before you promise one.
On a WooCommerce store
A stored conversation can contain a snapshot of what the visitor had in their cart at the time — that is what lets the cart summary still render when they scroll back.
It is covered by the same paths as everything else: erasing the conversation erases the snapshot with it. No customer name, address, or payment detail is involved, because the shopping tools never read them.
Writing your privacy policy
Four things worth stating, because visitors and regulators both ask:
- That chat messages are sent to an AI provider, and which one. If you use the Knowledge Base, that includes OpenAI even on a Gemini site.
- What is sent — see What Sohay sends to OpenAI and Google.
- That conversations are stored on your own site, and for how long after deletion.
- How somebody asks for theirs to be erased, including anonymous visitors.
Where to go next
How long conversations are kept for the retention job, and Deleting a conversation, and what happens next for the mechanics.
