NYC Transit Bot ("the Service") is designed to store as little as possible. This page describes what data the Service handles and what happens to it.
Consent records. When you opt in (on our website or by replying YES), we store your phone number, which version of these documents you accepted, when and how you accepted, and the time of your last interaction with the Service. That is the minimum needed to honor and prove your consent. If you don't use the Service for 30 days, your consent record is deleted automatically — you'll simply be asked to agree again the next time you text. A minimal log of opt-in and opt-out events is retained as compliance evidence (to demonstrate consent to carriers and resolve disputes).
Message content. The Service keeps a short rolling window of your recent messages in memory only, to support conversational follow-ups. This context is never written to disk or a database, is discarded as the conversation ages out or whenever the Service restarts, and is purged after at most 30 days in all cases. We do not build profiles, we do not use your data for advertising, and we do not sell or share your information with anyone.
One exception exists outside our systems: when you use the Service by text message, our SMS provider, Twilio, keeps a log of those messages — see the next section.
To interpret natural-language requests, the content of your messages is sent to Anthropic's Claude API for processing, and is handled by Anthropic in accordance with its Privacy Policy and Commercial Terms, including Anthropic's own limited data-retention practices for API traffic. When you ask for directions, the origin and destination place names or addresses you type (and nothing else) are sent to Mapbox's Geocoding API to be resolved into map coordinates, and are handled by Mapbox under its Privacy Policy.
Messages sent by SMS are carried by Twilio, our SMS provider, and your mobile carrier. Twilio keeps a log of SMS messages — phone number, message content, and delivery metadata — on its platform as part of providing the messaging service, under Twilio's Privacy Policy. We access that log only to operate and debug the Service, and we do not share it, or any of your data, with third parties. No mobile information is shared with third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes; text messaging originator opt-in data and consent are not shared with any third parties. Message frequency varies with your use of the Service, and message and data rates may apply according to your mobile plan.
The Service uses no analytics, no advertising trackers, and no cookies beyond a random session identifier stored in your own browser for the web debug interface. Standard, short-lived web server logs (IP address, request path) may exist transiently for operational debugging.
Text STOP to end replies at any time. If you simply stop texting the Service, your in-memory conversation context expires on its own and your consent record is deleted after 30 days of inactivity — leaving only the minimal opt-in/opt-out compliance log described above.
Any changes to this policy will be posted at this page.