GDPR, Compliance & Privacy¶

Abelo is designed with privacy and data protection principles at its core and is intended to support compliance with applicable privacy and electronic communications requirements, including the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), applicable provisions of the ePrivacy framework, and relevant carrier and messaging-provider policies.

Compliance note: Abelo's technical controls support merchants in meeting their legal and regulatory obligations. Whether a particular use of Abelo is compliant depends on the merchant's configuration, legal basis, notices, consent practices, retention requirements, and applicable law.

1. Consent Tracking by Channel¶

Promotional messaging generally requires an appropriate legal basis and, where required by applicable law, prior, explicit, and verifiable consent.

Abelo maintains consent records independently for each messaging channel so that consent for one channel does not automatically imply consent for another.

Profile: Alex P.
├── Viber Marketing:   [ Opted-In ]  (Method: Shopify Checkout, Timestamp: 2026-06-01)
├── SMS Marketing:     [ Opted-In ]  (Method: Website Widget,   Timestamp: 2026-07-15)
└── Email Marketing:   [ Opted-Out ] (Method: Unsubscribe Link, Timestamp: 2026-08-10)

Each consent record includes:

This channel-specific approach helps ensure that merchants can demonstrate when and how consent was obtained and can distinguish between consent states across different communication channels.

Consent Withdrawal¶

When a customer withdraws consent, the updated status is treated as authoritative for subsequent promotional messaging. Consent records should be retained as appropriate to demonstrate compliance and to prevent accidental re-enrollment.

2. Real-Time Pre-Send Enforcement¶

Consent is treated as a current state, rather than as a permanent authorization attached to a customer record.

Immediately before a message is transmitted to a carrier or messaging provider, Abelo's delivery engine checks the customer's current consent status in the Datastore.

The send process follows this principle:

1. The delivery engine retrieves the customer's current channel-specific consent record.
2. The current status is evaluated immediately before dispatch.
3. If consent has been withdrawn, the message is blocked.
4. Only customers with the required current authorization are eligible for the applicable promotional message.

This design helps prevent a message from being sent when a customer unsubscribes shortly before a scheduled or queued dispatch.

3. Right to Erasure ("Right to Be Forgotten")¶

Abelo supports workflows for responding to personal-data deletion requests, including requests initiated through supported platform mechanisms such as Shopify customer-redaction webhooks or through a merchant-initiated deletion process.

When a valid deletion request is processed, Abelo's data-erasure workflow is designed to:

1. Erase or anonymize direct identifiers, including where applicable:
   • first_name
   • last_name
   • email
   • phone_number
   • addresses
2. Maintain suppression protection. Where necessary to prevent a deleted contact from being unintentionally re-imported and re-subscribed, a cryptographically protected representation of the phone number may be retained in a suppression mechanism.
3. Retain only permitted business records. Financial or order-related aggregates may be retained where required for legitimate legal, tax, accounting, fraud-prevention, or other statutory purposes, provided that such retention is legally justified and the retained information is appropriately minimized and anonymized or otherwise protected where possible.

Important GDPR Qualification¶

The right to erasure under Article 17 GDPR is not absolute. Certain personal data may lawfully need to be retained where an applicable legal obligation or other Article 17 exception applies.

Accordingly, Abelo's deletion process should distinguish between:

• data that must be deleted;
• data that may be retained for a documented legal purpose;
• data that can be anonymized instead of deleted; and
• suppression information that must be retained to honor an individual's objection or unsubscribe request.

Any retained suppression identifier should be designed to minimize the possibility of re-identification and should be subject to appropriate access controls, security measures, and documented retention rules.

4. Multi-Tenant Data Isolation¶

Abelo is designed as a multi-tenant system with strict logical isolation between merchant accounts.

All customer data, consent records, analytics operations, and webhook processing are scoped to the merchant's organization_id.

Tenant isolation is enforced consistently across:

• database queries;
• customer records;
• consent records;
• analytics pipelines;
• message-delivery workflows;
• webhook handlers;
• background jobs; and
• administrative or API operations.

A request associated with one merchant must not be able to access, modify, or expose records belonging to another merchant.

5. Compliance Limitations¶

Abelo provides technical controls intended to help businesses meet their privacy and messaging obligations. However, the platform itself cannot determine whether every message or processing activity is legally permissible in every jurisdiction or business context.

The business remains responsible for determining, where applicable:

• the appropriate legal basis for processing;
• whether consent is required;
• the wording and presentation of consent notices;
• applicable cookie and tracking requirements;
• applicable direct-marketing rules;
• appropriate privacy notices;
• retention obligations;
• applicable data-subject rights procedures; and
• jurisdiction-specific regulatory requirements.

Nothing in this documentation should be interpreted as a legal opinion or a guarantee that a business's use of Abelo is compliant with GDPR, ePrivacy requirements, carrier rules, or other applicable laws.