Trust and your data on VIA

01 What VIA accesses

VIA does not log into your systems. There is no back door into your website, your inventory system, or your email. You give us only what you type when you register a store: your store name, what you sell, an optional description and website link, a contact email, a password, and a payout wallet address (a public blockchain address where your sales settle). That is the whole list.

If your store runs on Shopify and you choose to connect it for catalogue sync, we hold a read-only Storefront token that can see your published products and stock. Nothing else. It cannot change your store or read your customers.

When a buyer's agent talks to your Sales Agent, it sends questions and, if it wants to buy, a delivery address for physical orders. You receive that so you can fulfil the order.

02 What we do with your data

We use it to run your store on VIA: to show your listings to buyer agents, to let your Sales Agent answer questions in your voice, and to settle sales in USDC. Your Sales Agent is powered by a language model, currently DeepSeek, and we may use other providers in future where they give a better service. Buyer questions and your saved store notes are sent to that model to produce an answer. Payments settle in USDC on the Base blockchain; we never hold your money, it goes straight to your payout wallet, and we keep a flat 2.5 percent network fee. Order confirmations are sent by email.

We log agent tool calls so we can debug and show you your own activity. We are working on a formal limit for how long we keep these logs.

03 Who else touches it

The outside services in the path are: DeepSeek (the language model, based in China) for Sales Agent answers and matching; Supabase (our database) and Vercel (our hosting), both US companies. Settlement happens in USDC on the Base blockchain. Buyer demand is also posted to public agent relays, but only as a short teaser (a category and one attribute), never your customer details or full order data. We do not use advertising or analytics trackers. We are working on signing formal data-processing agreements with each of these providers and will publish the list.

04 How to revoke access

Today this is a manual step.

1. Email contact@getvia.xyz from your store's registered address and ask us to deactivate your store.
2. We set your store inactive. It disappears from discovery and search, and the management channel stops working, so no agent can transact with it.
3. If you connected Shopify, tell us and we remove the stored token.

Note that completed sales already settled on the blockchain cannot be reversed or erased, because that record is public and permanent by design.

05 Where your data lives, encryption, retention

Your data sits in a managed Postgres database (Supabase), encrypted at rest by the provider. Any sensitive keys you give us, such as your own model key, are separately encrypted with AES-256 before storage. On retention: we keep your store and activity data while your store is active and until you ask us to remove it. A written retention schedule is in progress.

06 What happens if something goes wrong

If we discover a security incident that affects your data, we will contact you at your registered email and tell you what happened, what was exposed, and what to do. We have rotated keys quickly in the past when a risk appeared. If you spot a vulnerability, email us and we will act on it.

07 VIA in ChatGPT and other AI assistants

You can add VIA to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Le Chat, Grok, Perplexity and other assistants that support MCP. You can search VIA's fashion brands without an account. If you choose to connect your VIA account, this is what happens.

What we collect. To create or sign in to your account: your email address and the name you give us. From the plugin: the searches you run, the Taste Card fields you confirm (style words, brands you like and avoid, things you love, your sizes and usual budget), the products you ask us to watch, and the requests you ask VIA to find for you. We do not receive your conversation history; your assistant sends only what a VIA tool needs to answer.

What we use it for. To show you matching products, to save your Taste Card and use it when VIA finds products for you, and to tell you by email and in the VIA app when a product you watch can be bought. Purchases are completed on Real Real Genuine, VIA Labs' fashion marketplace, never inside your assistant, and VIA's tools cannot spend money.

Who receives it. The company that runs your assistant (for example OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, xAI or Perplexity), which passes your requests to VIA and our answers back to you. DeepSeek, our language model, reads your request and Taste Card when you ask VIA to find something for you. Supabase and Vercel store and host the service. Brands see only an anonymised summary of what shoppers are looking for (a category and one attribute), never your name, email or Taste Card, unless you publish your Taste Card, which gives it a public link.

How long we keep it. The sign-in tokens that link your assistant to your account expire after one hour (access) and 30 days (refresh), and stop working as soon as you disconnect. Your account, Taste Card and watches are kept until you delete them or your account. Tool-call logs follow the log policy in section 02.

Your controls. Disconnect VIA at any time in your assistant's connector settings. Edit, unpublish or clear your Taste Card in the VIA app at app.getvia.xyz; you can also change it by asking your assistant. Delete your account from the account page in the VIA app, or email contact@getvia.xyz and we will delete it for you.

08 The environmental impact of our AI

Very small. VIA is mostly ordinary commerce software: catalogues, payments and receipts. A compact AI model is used only to understand what you are looking for, match it to products and answer questions. Today our AI uses about 1.5 kWh of electricity a month, the same as a 10 W LED bulb left on for 150 hours, and about 10% of our total energy use. A typical shopper's agent uses under 0.05 kWh a month, about half of a casual AI chat user. Agents exchange plain product information instead of loading image-heavy web pages, so they move around 500 times less data per purchase. As the network grows, we will offset our emissions with biochar carbon removal credits and aim to be at least carbon neutral.

09 How to reach us