This Privacy Policy explains how AWB Guru Inc ("AWBGuru," "we," "us") collects and uses personal information. It has two distinct scopes, and the distinction matters:
- Information about you, our customer — the freight forwarder, your staff, and website visitors. For this information we act as a data controller, and this Privacy Policy governs it.
- The documents you send us for processing — air waybills and related shipping documents you upload or email to AWBGuru. For this content we act as a data processor on your behalf. How we handle that content is governed by our Terms of Service and, where applicable, a Data Processing Addendum — not primarily by this Privacy Policy. See §7 Documents you process through AWBGuru.
1. Who we are
AWBGuru is an automated air waybill (AWB/MAWB) document capture and data-extraction service for freight forwarders. The service ingests shipping documents, extracts structured data, and returns it via API and a web interface.
- Legal entity: AWB Guru Inc, a New York corporation.
- Contact for privacy inquiries: hello@awbguru.com
- Postal address: 475 Northern Blvd, Ste 29, Great Neck, NY 11021, USA
2. Information we collect about you (as controller)
Account and identity data. Name, business email, company name, and role of the people who register for or administer an AWBGuru account.
Team and account-governance data. For accounts with more than one user, we process the roles you assign (e.g., Owner, Member), the email addresses you enter to invite teammates (which may be personal data of someone who is not yet an AWBGuru user), and a log of account activity that account Owners can view, used for auditing, governance, and support.
Billing data. We use Stripe to process payments. Payment card numbers are collected and stored by Stripe, not by AWBGuru — we hold only a Stripe customer reference and non-sensitive metadata (e.g., the last four digits, card brand, billing status). AWBGuru never sees or stores full card numbers. See Security & Subprocessors.
Usage and telemetry data. Aggregate usage counts (documents processed, pages, API calls), feature usage, and log data used for billing, fraud prevention, product analytics, and support.
Support communications. Anything you send us when you contact support.
Technical data. IP address, browser/device information, and cookies necessary to operate the web application and keep you signed in.
Website analytics data. On our public website, and only if you accept analytics cookies in our cookie banner, we use Google Analytics to collect standard web-analytics data — pages viewed, referring links, approximate location (from IP), and device/browser information — tied to a pseudonymous identifier.
3. How we use your information
- To provide, maintain, and secure the service and your account.
- To meter usage and bill you (via Stripe).
- To detect, prevent, and investigate fraud, abuse, and security incidents.
- To provide support and respond to your requests.
- To improve the service through aggregate, non-identifying analytics.
- To understand how visitors use our public website through Google Analytics, where you have accepted analytics cookies.
- To improve the accuracy of our extraction using de-identified data derived from documents and from review corrections — on by default, with an opt-out (see §7).
- To operate multi-user accounts — provisioning roles, processing team invitations, and maintaining an activity audit trail for account governance and support.
- To send service, transactional, and administrative communications — including sign-in and account-verification codes and links, team invitations, billing and payment notices, document-processing results and status, exception and calibration alerts, and periodic activity summaries (and, only with an appropriate lawful basis or your consent, product updates).
We do not sell your personal information. Our third-party AI provider does not train on your documents; we use only de-identified data to improve our own extraction, and you can opt out (see §7).
4. Where the service is offered
AWBGuru is offered only to U.S.-based businesses accessing the service from the United States (see our Terms of Service). We do not offer or direct the service to, and do not target, individuals or businesses in the EU or UK, and we do not rely on the GDPR or UK GDPR legal-bases framework. Where U.S. federal or state privacy laws apply, we process personal information consistent with those laws.
5. Cookies
We use two kinds of cookies:
- Strictly-necessary cookies — required to run the web application: authentication and session, security (anti-forgery), and a short-lived document-upload token. These are always active and do not require consent.
- Analytics cookies (Google Analytics). On our public website we use Google Analytics (GA4) to understand site usage. These are not set unless you accept them via our cookie banner, and you can decline or change your choice at any time. We do not use advertising cookies.
Because we set non-essential (analytics) cookies, we show a cookie-consent banner on our public pages and load Google Analytics only after you consent.
6. How we share your information
We share personal information only with:
- Subprocessors who help us run the service, under contract and confidentiality obligations — covering cloud hosting and storage, email delivery and intake, AI-based document extraction, billing, and website analytics, all in the United States. Our current subprocessors are listed and kept up to date, with notice of material changes, in Security & Subprocessors — the authoritative list.
- Destinations you direct. Where you enable them, we deliver extracted results to destinations you configure: webhook URLs you register through our API (signed for integrity), and — for documents received by email intake — by email reply to the original sender. You are responsible for the destinations you configure and for the downstream handling of data delivered to them.
- Legal and safety recipients when required by law, to enforce our terms, or to protect rights and safety.
- Business transfers — in a merger, acquisition, or asset sale, subject to this Policy.
We do not sell personal information.
7. Documents you process through AWBGuru
When you upload documents or email them to your AWBGuru intake address, those documents — and any personal data inside them, including shipper and consignee names, addresses, and contact details — are customer content that we process as your processor, on your instructions.
- Third-party AI does not train on your documents. Document content sent to our AI extraction subprocessor is not used by that subprocessor to train its models, under its commercial API terms.
- We improve our own extraction using de-identified data. We (AWB Guru) may use data derived from your documents and from the corrections your team makes during review to improve the accuracy of our own extraction — our prompts and skills, validation rules, and evaluation datasets. This is our own product-improvement activity; it is not third-party AI model training. By default we use anonymized, de-identified data for this purpose, with shipper, consignee, and other identifying details removed. We use raw (non-anonymized) documents for this purpose only with your consent. This improvement use is on by default; you can opt out at any time in your account settings (or by contacting us at hello@awbguru.com). We retain this de-identified improvement data for up to 24 months, after which it is automatically deleted.
- We never expose your data to other customers. We do not make your documents or identifiable data available to any other customer. Only anonymized, aggregated improvements — which cannot be traced back to you or your documents — benefit the service generally.
- Retention is under your control. Extracted structured data and the original document files (images/PDFs) are retained as your system of record for the life of the record — that is, until you delete the record or close your account — so you can view the source alongside the extracted data.
- Deletion. On your written request or on account closure we delete customer content from production systems within 30 days, subject to any legal retention obligations; backups expire on our normal backup cycle (within approximately 35 days).
- Duplicate detection. To warn you when the same air waybill is submitted more than once, we compare new documents against the air waybill numbers already in your account from the previous 12 months. If you delete a document or close your account, it is removed from this check along with everything else — we do not keep any separate record of a deleted document.
- Email intake. Documents sent to your intake address are received into a Google Workspace (Gmail) mailbox we operate, then processed. Once a message is processed, it is deleted from the intake mailbox within 24 hours; messages held for review are automatically deleted after 30 days.
Your rights and our obligations regarding customer content are set out in the Terms of Service and any Data Processing Addendum.
8. Data location and international transfers
AWBGuru is hosted in the United States (Microsoft Azure, Central US region). If you access the service from outside the United States, your information will be transferred to and processed in the United States.
9. Data retention
- Account and billing data: retained for the life of the account and afterward as required for tax, accounting, and legal recordkeeping.
- Customer content (documents and extracted data): as described in §7.
- Logs and telemetry: retained for up to 12 months for security and operational purposes, then deleted or aggregated.
10. Your rights
Depending on your state, you may have rights to access, correct, delete, or port your personal information, and to opt out of certain processing. To exercise these rights, contact us at hello@awbguru.com; we fulfill verified requests within 30 days (extendable where the law allows). For customer content, note that we act as processor — for data inside documents, direct requests to the customer (controller) who submitted them, and we will assist that customer as required.
11. Security
We use encryption in transit and at rest, access controls, and other safeguards described in Security & Subprocessors. No system is perfectly secure; we cannot guarantee absolute security.
12. Children
AWBGuru is a business service intended for users aged 18 or older. It is not directed to children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18. If we learn that we have collected such information, we will delete it.
13. Changes to this Policy
We may update this Policy. Material changes will be communicated through the service or by email, and the "last updated" date above will change.
14. Contact
Questions about this Policy or our privacy practices: hello@awbguru.com, AWB Guru Inc, 475 Northern Blvd, Ste 29, Great Neck, NY 11021, USA.