Privacy notice

Who is responsible

Audacia Ltd (business registration number C20176915), Block E, River Court, St Denis Street, Port-Louis, Mauritius, runs Online Office. It is the controller for Audacia's email, clients and matters, and for the owner's personal section of the system.

Lutchmenarraidoo Chambers, Block E, Ground Floor, River Court, St Denis Street, Port-Louis, Mauritius, is a separate controller for the Chambers' email, clients and matters. Audacia Ltd runs the system for it.

Audacia Ltd has a Data Protection Officer. Write to dpo@audacia.mu about either practice, or by post to the address above, for the attention of the Data Protection Officer.

What we hold and where it comes from

• Email. Messages sent to and from the practices' mailboxes: sender and recipients, subject, text, attachments, and the text read out of the attachments (including scanned documents).
• Clients and matters. Names and contact details of clients and their representatives, their organisations, the matter, the other parties to it, instructions, the documents we prepare, invoices and payments.
• Enquiries. When someone asks about our services: name, email address, organisation, what they asked about and how they found us. For Audacia, a new enquiry emailed to contact@audacia.mu is also recorded as an enquiry in Audacia's growth system (see Who receives it).
• Bank lines. Bank statements the owner uploads, which name who paid and how much.
• Calendars. Entries in the practices' and the owner's Google calendars.
• The owner's messages. Instructions the owner sends to the system through Telegram.
• Records of use. An audit trail of what the system and the owner did, and technical logs.

Most of this is not collected from you directly. It arrives in email that you or someone else sent, or in documents about a matter.

Correspondence with a legal practice can contain special categories of personal data, such as information about health or about an alleged offence. We process it only where section 29 of the Act allows, in particular where it is necessary to establish, exercise or defend a legal claim (section 29(1)(d)(i)).

What we use it for, and on what basis

• To read and answer correspondence. Each message that reaches a practice's mailbox is sorted automatically, and the system can prepare a draft reply. A reply stays in the mailbox's Drafts until a person reads it and sends it.
• To do the work of a matter. Keeping the file, tracking deadlines and tasks, researching the law, and drafting advice and documents. Legal work drafted by one AI model is challenged by a different one and then reviewed by a lawyer before it is used.
• To bill and be paid. Invoices, payment reminders, and matching bank payments to invoices. The system sends an invoice or a reminder only after the owner has approved that message.
• To run the owner's day. A morning summary and reminders over Telegram, and bills and renewals found in the owner's mail.
• To keep the system secure and accountable. Access control, the audit trail, logs and backups.
• To answer enquiries about our services and follow them up. Each message is sorted as described under Automated processing; for Audacia, one sorted as a new enquiry, a request for an engagement or a request for an audit proposal, sent to contact@audacia.mu and the first message of its conversation, is passed to Audacia's growth system.

Our legal bases are in section 28 of the Act: performing a contract with you, or taking steps you asked for before one (section 28(1)(b)(i)); complying with our legal obligations, such as keeping accounting and professional records (section 28(1)(b)(ii)); and our legitimate interests in dealing with correspondence sent to the practices, running and securing them, and answering enquiries, except where that would be unwarranted given the harm to your rights and interests (section 28(1)(b)(vii)).

You do not have to give us personal data. If you are a client, we need what is necessary to act for you and to meet our legal obligations, and we may not be able to act without it.

Automated processing

• Sorting mail. An AI model reads each incoming message and says what kind it is, how urgent it is, and which client and matter it probably belongs to. That decides where the owner sees it and whether a draft reply is prepared. It decides nothing about you.
• Drafts. Replies and documents are drafted by AI models. None is sent or used without a person's review.
• Bank payments. When the system is at least 90% confident that a payment matches an invoice, it records the payment against it. Below that, the match waits for the owner. Any match can be corrected.
• Conflicts. Before new work, the system checks existing clients and matters. If it finds a conflict or an independence problem, it stops the work until the owner decides.
• Bills in the owner's mail wait for the owner. Nothing is paid or entered automatically.

The system takes no decision that produces legal effects for you or significantly affects you on its own (section 38 of the Act).

Who receives it

• AI model providers: Anthropic (Claude models), Google (Gemini models), xAI (Grok models) and OpenAI (a final check on legal letters). They receive the text being worked on, such as an email, its attachments or a matter's documents, with the names in it, and process it to answer the request.
• Legal research services: the legal.mu research service, the French government's PISTE service (Légifrance and Judilibre), LibreJustice and Legal Data Hunter, and a web search service, Serper. They receive search queries the system writes, which can include a name or a fact from a matter.
• Google hosts the practices' mailboxes and calendars and the owner's Gmail, and stores our encrypted backups in Google Drive.
• Telegram carries the owner's morning summary and notices, which can name a client, a matter, a sender or a subject line, and the owner's own calendar entries.
• Hostinger provides the server Online Office runs on.
• Audacia's growth system, its enquiry and marketing system, run by Audacia Ltd on the same server. For Audacia only, when a new enquiry is emailed to contact@audacia.mu, the growth system reads the sender's name and email address, the subject and the message from Online Office, and records them as an enquiry. Online Office sends it nothing else. Mail kept for the owner alone because it concerns the Financial Intelligence Unit, mail from a client who has told us to stop sending their material to AI providers, and Lutchmenarraidoo Chambers' mail are never passed to it.
• Courts, public authorities and others where the law requires it.

We do not sell personal data or share it with advertisers, and we use no analytics or tracking services.

Transfers outside Mauritius

Online Office does not run in Mauritius. Its server is in a Hostinger data centre outside Mauritius. The AI providers are based in the United States. Google, Telegram and the research services process data in their own facilities, which may be in several countries. Those countries may not protect personal data to the standard of the Act.

We transfer personal data abroad under section 36 of the Act where the transfer is necessary to perform our contract with you or to take steps you asked for before one (section 36(1)(c)(i)), to perform a contract made in your interest (section 36(1)(c)(ii)), or to establish, exercise or defend a legal claim (section 36(1)(c)(iv)). You can ask us about the safeguards that apply (section 37(2)(i)).

How long we keep it

• Email, clients, matters and documents: for as long as the client relationship or the matter lasts, then for as long as our legal and professional record-keeping obligations require or a claim remains possible. The system does not delete them automatically at the end of that period. We delete them when they are no longer needed (section 27 of the Act).
• Conversations with the owner's assistant, and raw messages received from Telegram and Google: 90 days.
• Bills found in the owner's mail: for each message read, the sender, subject, date and the result of the reading, so that it is not read twice.
• Invoices: 7 years.
• The audit trail: 7 years. It cannot be edited.
• Backups: made daily and encrypted before they leave the server. Copies on the server are kept for 7 days. Copies in Google Drive have no automatic end date yet.
• Technical logs: overwritten as they fill up.

Your rights

Under the Act you can:

• ask whether we hold personal data about you, and for a copy (section 37). Ask in writing. It is free unless the request is manifestly excessive. We answer within one month, or two months for complex or numerous requests, and we may ask you to confirm who you are;
• have inaccurate data corrected and incomplete data completed (section 39(1));
• have data erased, for example when we no longer need it or it was processed unlawfully (section 39(2));
• ask us to restrict processing, for example while you dispute its accuracy (section 39(5));
• object in writing, at any time, to our processing of your personal data, and object to its use for direct marketing (section 40). We then stop, unless we have compelling legitimate grounds that override your interests or need the data for a legal claim;
• not be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing (section 38);
• withdraw your consent where we rely on it, without affecting what was done before. A client can tell us at any time to stop sending their material to AI providers, and the system then refuses to send it.

Some rights have limits. For example, we need not erase data we need for a legal claim or to comply with a legal obligation (section 39(4)), and other exceptions in the Act can apply.

To use any of these rights, write to dpo@audacia.mu.

Complaints

You can complain to the Data Protection Commissioner at the Data Protection Office: dataprotection.govmu.org. If the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation applies to you, you also have the rights it gives and can complain to your own supervisory authority.

Google account data

This section is about the Google accounts the owner connects to Online Office: the two practices' Google Workspace accounts and the owner's personal Gmail account. Online Office has no other users and asks no one else to sign in with Google.

What it accesses.

• Gmail: it reads messages and their attachments, labels them, moves them to the bin and creates drafts. It never deletes a message permanently, creates filters or sets up forwarding, and it sends nothing from the owner's personal Gmail.
• Google Calendar: it reads events, and creates the events the owner asks for, without inviting anyone.
• Google Drive (the practices' Workspace only): it stores encrypted backups.

How the personal Gmail is used. Once an hour, the system searches the last 45 days of mail for bills and renewal notices and reads at most 10 new ones. Up to 12,000 characters of each (sender, subject, text and attachment text) go to Anthropic's Claude model, which says whether it is a bill and where its amount and due date are. The sender, subject, date and that answer are kept. A bill waits on the owner's Renewals page until the owner accepts or rejects it. The personal calendar is read to show the owner's day, including in the morning summary sent over Telegram. The owner can also search and read the mailboxes from their own computer with Online Office's tools, including through an AI assistant (Anthropic's Claude) acting on the owner's instructions.

Limited Use. Online Office'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. In particular:

• Google user data is used only to provide the features above to the owner.
• It is not sold, not used for advertising, and not used to assess anyone's creditworthiness or for lending.
• It is not used to develop, improve or train AI models. It goes to an AI provider only to process the request in hand.
• No one reads it except the owner, unless the owner asks for it, it is needed for security (for example to investigate abuse), or the law requires it.

Storage and security. It is stored in the Online Office database on the server described above, reached only over encrypted connections, with daily encrypted backups. The keys that let the system reach Google are kept in files only the service can read.

Removing access. The owner can remove Online Office's access to the personal account at any time at myaccount.google.com/connections. For the Workspace accounts, the administrator removes it in the Google Admin console. Data already copied into Online Office is then kept and deleted as described under How long we keep it. To have it deleted sooner, write to dpo@audacia.mu.

Cookies

This page and the sign-in page set no cookie. When the owner signs in, one cookie, oo_session, keeps them signed in for 30 days. It is strictly necessary, cannot be read by scripts, and is sent only over encrypted connections to this site. There are no analytics, advertising or tracking cookies.

Security

Only the owner's access token opens the system. Connections are encrypted. Backups are encrypted before they leave the server. Every significant action is recorded in an audit trail that cannot be edited.

Changes to this notice

We update this notice when the system changes, and change the date at the top.