Hallo Marco Hallo Marco

Data processing agreement

Data processing agreement under Art. 28 GDPR between the customer as controller ("controller") and Bavarian Valley UG (haftungsbeschränkt), Passauer Str. 21, 81369 Munich, Germany ("processor", "we"). Version 1.4, as of 28 October 2026.

This English text is a translation for convenience. Only the German version at hallomarco.de/avv is legally binding.

This agreement becomes part of the contract for Hallo Marco ("main contract") when the controller accepts it: when booking a plan, on registration or when accepting an invitation, in any case before the first call Marco handles for it. We store the time, person and version of the acceptance. Annex 1 describes the technical and organisational measures, Annex 2 the sub-processors.

1. Subject matter and duration

  1. We process personal data on behalf of the controller in order to provide it with the Hallo Marco service under the main contract.
  2. This agreement applies as long as the main contract runs and beyond that until we have deleted or returned all of the controller's data under section 10.

2. Nature, purpose and scope of processing

  1. Nature of processing: answering and conducting phone calls and message conversations (WhatsApp, email, website chat) by an AI assistant; converting speech to text and text to speech (speech output with Marco's voice, another chosen voice or an employee's voice); processing the content with an AI language model; searching the controller's knowledge; storing conversation histories, summaries, requests, contacts, appointments, callback tasks and, where switched on, recordings; booking appointments in the calendar of the controller or its employees (Google, Microsoft or CalDAV); sending replies; notifying the controller's people; transmitting requests, contact details and summaries to services the controller connects; calculating travel times and service areas, where switched on; creating and using an artificial voice of an employee of the controller with their consent, where switched on; export and deletion.
  2. Purpose: making the controller reachable for its customers and prospects, answering enquiries, taking down requests, arranging appointments and handing over to humans.
  3. We process the data only to the extent necessary for these purposes and not for our own purposes. We do not use the data to train AI models.

3. Types of data and categories of data subjects

  1. Data subjects: callers, senders of messages and website visitors using the chat (customers, prospects, patients, clients, guests and other contacts of the controller); people talked about in conversations; employees and other users of the controller; people whose data is contained in the controller's knowledge.
  2. Types of data: phone number, sender address or chat identifier; date, time and duration; conversation content as text, summaries and requests; information Marco asks for per request type (such as name, address, date of birth, preferred appointment, vehicle data, area of law); the texts Marco speaks; voice recordings, where switched on; attachments, photos and voice messages in messages; appointments; contact details and roles of the controller's users; voice samples, the artificial voice created from them and the consent and withdrawal of employees who provide their voice; content of the knowledge; technical data such as IP addresses and timestamps.
  3. Special categories of personal data (Art. 9 GDPR), such as health data in medical practices, and data subject to a professional duty of confidentiality may occur if callers share them or the controller has Marco ask for them. The controller decides whether it uses Hallo Marco for this and chooses suitable settings. For professional secrecy holders, the addendum for professional secrecy holders also applies.

4. Rights and obligations of the controller

  1. The controller is responsible for the lawfulness of the processing, in particular for the legal basis, informing data subjects under Art. 13 and 14 GDPR and, where required, for consents, for example to the recording of calls.
  2. Instructions: The main contract, this agreement and the settings the controller chooses in the application (such as retention period, recording, channels, integrations) are its documented instructions. It gives further instructions in text form to contact@hallomarco.com. Owners and administrators of the controller's account are authorised to give instructions.
  3. The controller informs us without undue delay if it finds errors or irregularities in the processing.
  4. If the controller uses an employee's voice, it is responsible for ensuring that consent is given freely. It exerts no pressure and attaches no disadvantages to a refusal or withdrawal. The employee gives consent personally, expressly and in text form, in their own account in Hallo Marco; we store the wording, version, time, IP address and browser as proof and make it available to the controller on request. If there is a works council, the controller clarifies its involvement beforehand. If we set up an own voice at the controller's request that is created from the voice of a real person, we only do so if that person's consent has been given expressly and in text form and is documented, as with an employee's voice.

5. Obligations of the processor

  1. We process the data only on documented instructions from the controller, including with regard to transfers to a third country, unless we are required to do so by Union law or German law. In that case, we inform the controller of the legal requirement beforehand, unless the law prohibits this.
  2. If we consider an instruction to be unlawful, we inform the controller without undue delay. We may suspend its execution until the controller confirms or changes it.
  3. Persons at our company with access to the data are bound to confidentiality or are under a statutory obligation of confidentiality. They process the data only on our instructions.
  4. We take the technical and organisational measures under Art. 32 GDPR described in Annex 1. We may adapt them to the state of the art as long as the level of protection does not decrease.
  5. Our staff access data in the controller's account only where necessary for setup, support, troubleshooting, prevention of abuse or at the controller's request. Every such access is logged.
  6. We have not appointed a data protection officer because, in our current assessment, the requirements for this are not met. The contact for data protection is the management, reachable at contact@hallomarco.com.

6. Assistance to the controller

  1. We assist the controller with appropriate measures in responding to requests from data subjects for access, rectification, erasure, restriction, data portability and objection. The controller can view, export and delete contacts, conversations and knowledge in the application itself; if a data subject requests erasure, the controller deletes their data there immediately and without the trash. If data subjects contact us directly, we forward the request to the controller without undue delay and do not respond ourselves unless the controller instructs us to.
  2. We assist the controller with the security of processing, with notifications of personal data breaches, with data protection impact assessments and with prior consultations (Art. 32 to 36 GDPR), as far as the information available to us allows.
  3. For assistance that goes beyond the features of the application and minor effort and is not due to a breach on our part, we may charge reasonable remuneration based on effort if we announce it in advance.

7. Notification of personal data breaches

If we become aware of a breach of the security of the controller's personal data, we inform the controller without undue delay, if possible within 24 hours, by email to the address of the account owner. The notification contains, as far as known, the nature of the breach, the categories and approximate number of data subjects and records concerned, the likely consequences and the measures taken or proposed. We provide missing information as soon as it is available. Notifying the supervisory authority and informing data subjects remain the controller's task; we assist it.

8. Sub-processors

  1. The controller gives general authorisation for the engagement of sub-processors. Annex 2 names the sub-processors engaged at the time of conclusion; their engagement is deemed approved.
  2. We inform the controller by email at least 30 days before adding or replacing a sub-processor. Within this period, the controller may object in text form for an important reason relating to data protection. If we find no solution, the controller may terminate the main contract with effect from the change. In urgent cases, for example if a provider fails or security reasons require it, we may shorten the period; we then inform the controller without undue delay.
  3. We bind every sub-processor by contract to data protection obligations that essentially correspond to those of this agreement, in particular to appropriate technical and organisational measures. We select sub-processors carefully and check their guarantees.
  4. Not sub-processing within the meaning of this section are ancillary services we use, such as telecommunication and postal services, and services the controller connects to Hallo Marco itself and with whose providers it has its own contracts, such as its calendar or mailbox at Google or Microsoft, a CalDAV calendar (such as iCloud or Nextcloud), its WhatsApp Business account, its Slack workspace, Microsoft Teams, its customer relationship software (such as Pipedrive or HubSpot) and webhook targets and automation services (such as Zapier, Make or n8n). We transmit data to these services on the controller's instructions. The controller is responsible for the data in these services; their providers are not our sub-processors.

9. Transfers to third countries

  1. We store the controller's data in data centres in Germany. Some processing steps take place outside the European Union and the European Economic Area, in particular in the USA: the AI language model, parts of speech recognition, the speech output in every call (Marco's voice or the chosen voice), the team voice where switched on, error and performance monitoring and, where switched on, WhatsApp, SMS and the map service for service area and travel time. Annex 2 states the location and basis for each provider.
  2. We only transfer data to a third country if the requirements of Art. 44 to 49 GDPR are met, in particular on the basis of an adequacy decision (such as the EU-US Data Privacy Framework for certified providers) or the standard contractual clauses of the European Commission (module 3, processor to sub-processor), with supplementary measures where necessary. The controller instructs and authorises us to use the agreements required for this on its behalf.
  3. If a basis ceases to apply, for example because an adequacy decision is revoked, we inform the controller without undue delay and switch to another permissible basis or another provider.

10. Deletion and return

  1. During the term, we delete conversations with messages and events, recordings and notifications by SMS or WhatsApp (also at our telephony provider), summaries, callback tasks, appointments, open questions and delivery logs after the retention period chosen by the controller: 30, 90 or 365 days after the last activity, with 90 days as the default. Contacts are kept until the controller deletes them, a data subject requests their erasure or we delete the controller's data under paragraph 3.
  2. What the controller deletes in the application, such as contacts, conversations, knowledge or callback tasks, stays in a trash for 30 days and is no longer visible to Marco, in lists, in search or in exports during this time. In the trash, the controller can restore it or delete it for good immediately; after 30 days we delete it, also at our telephony provider. Erasure at the request of a data subject takes effect immediately, without the trash.
  3. At the end of the contract, the controller can export its data (main contract, terms § 14). 30 days after the end of the contract, or earlier on request, we delete all of the controller's data including the knowledge and the trash. Deleted data disappears from our backups after at most 14 further days. On request, we confirm the deletion in text form.
  4. We delete voice samples for the team voice as soon as the voice has been created. We delete the voice itself, also at ElevenLabs, as soon as the employee withdraws consent, leaves the business, deletes their account or requests erasure, as soon as the controller removes the voice, and at the end of the contract.
  5. Excepted are data we must retain by law, such as invoice data, as well as usage data without conversation content, access logs, acceptances of our contract documents and the records of consent and withdrawal for the team voice (without recordings, until three years after withdrawal); we process them only for these purposes.

11. Evidence and audits

  1. On request, we demonstrate compliance with our obligations to the controller, primarily through information, these documents, logs and evidence from our sub-processors (such as certificates and audit reports).
  2. If this is not sufficient, the controller may carry out an audit itself or through an auditor bound to confidentiality who is not our competitor, after prior notice of at least 30 days during our business hours, at most once per calendar year unless there is a specific reason. The audit must not impair our operations or the data of other customers. The controller bears the costs unless the audit reveals a material breach.
  3. The controller audits the data centres of our sub-processors through their evidence; there is no right of access of its own there.

12. Liability and final provisions

  1. Liability towards data subjects is governed by Art. 82 GDPR. As between the parties, the liability rules of the main contract apply unless Art. 82 GDPR mandatorily provides otherwise.
  2. In case of conflict, this agreement takes precedence over the terms with regard to the protection of personal data. The addendum for professional secrecy holders takes precedence over this agreement.
  3. We announce changes to this agreement in the same way as changes to the terms (terms § 15). Changes that lower the level of protection are excluded without the controller's express consent.
  4. German law applies. The place of jurisdiction is that of the main contract. The German version prevails.

Annex 1: Technical and organisational measures (Art. 32 GDPR)

As of 28 October 2026. The measures describe the Hallo Marco service (application manage.hallomarco.com, interfaces and voice service).

Confidentiality

  • Physical access: The servers are located in data centres of our hosting provider in Germany with access control, video surveillance and security staff; the provider is certified under ISO/IEC 27001. We do not operate our own server rooms.
  • Access to systems: Sign-in to the application with a passkey or password, optionally with a second factor; limits on sign-in attempts; registration with spam protection and confirmation of the email address. Server access only via SSH keys for a few named people; firewall with only the necessary ports open. Work devices with encrypted drives, screen lock and current updates.
  • Access to data: Roles per business (owner, administrator, member) with graded rights; every query is limited to the user's business. Access by our staff to a customer's account is logged. Access tokens for calendars and other integrations, including app passwords for CalDAV calendars, are stored encrypted. Secrets (keys, passwords) are kept only in the server configuration, not in the source code.
  • Separation: Data of different businesses is logically separated; development, test and production environments have separate databases. Tests never work with real conversation data.
  • Data minimisation: Log files and error reports contain identifiers and metrics, no conversation content. Voice messages are converted to text on our own systems in Germany; they are not sent to any external provider for this. For speech output, the speech synthesis provider only receives the text Marco speaks, never the voice or recordings of callers; the voice service keeps the generated sentences in memory only briefly, until the telephony provider has played them. The knowledge search runs with our own model, hosted in Germany; knowledge and questions are not sent to any external provider for it. Push notifications to the installed app are end-to-end encrypted; the browser vendors' push services cannot read their content. Recordings are only played through our server after sign-in, never through public links of the telephony provider. The website chat sets no cookies and only stores a conversation identifier for the lifetime of the browser tab.

Integrity

  • Transmission: All connections are encrypted (TLS). Incoming messages from telephony, email and payment providers are verified by their signatures; requests without a valid signature are rejected. The voice service talks to the application only through signed requests from approved addresses.
  • Own domain: We send emails and links under a business's domain only after the business has confirmed the domain with a DNS record. Links run through a subdomain of the business with its own TLS certificate to our servers.
  • Input and changes: A log records who viewed, changed, exported or deleted data and when our staff accessed an account. Acceptances of contract documents are stored with version, time, person and technical context.
  • Software changes: Every change passes automated tests and static checks before it is deployed. We install security updates for the operating system and software promptly.

Availability and resilience

  • Backup of the database every six hours, together with the uploaded files additionally kept in separate storage in another data centre in Germany; every copy is deleted after at most 14 days; documented restore procedure.
  • The voice service runs in two instances; if one fails, the other takes over. Continuous health checks and alerts on errors, for example if deletions at the telephony provider fail.
  • Fixed limits against overload and abuse: maximum duration per call, rate limits for chat and interfaces, a daily maximum of automatic email replies per business.
  • Documented procedure for security incidents: contain, preserve evidence, find the cause, inform data subjects and customers.

Data protection by design and by default

  • The AI notice is spoken or shown at the beginning of every conversation and can neither be interrupted nor switched off.
  • A recording starts only after the recording notice and only if the business has switched it on. For industries with a duty of confidentiality, recording and WhatsApp are off by default.
  • Retention periods per business (30, 90 or 365 days, default 90) are enforced automatically every day, also at the telephony provider. What the business deletes stays in the trash for 30 days; erasure at the request of data subjects takes effect immediately. Registrations without a confirmed email address are deleted after 48 hours, exports after seven days.
  • Deleted knowledge sources are removed from Marco's search immediately; all passages and search vectors are removed with the final deletion. When reading in websites, we respect robots.txt.
  • Customer content is not used to train AI models.

Organisation

  • All people with access are bound in writing to confidentiality and, where data of professional secrecy holders is concerned, to secrecy under § 203 of the German Criminal Code (StGB), and have been informed of the criminal consequences.
  • Sub-processors are selected according to data protection and security and bound by contracts under Art. 28 GDPR (Annex 2).
  • We review these measures at least once a year and after material changes.

Annex 2: Sub-processors

As of 28 October 2026. "DPF" means the EU-US Data Privacy Framework (adequacy decision of the European Commission of 10 July 2023), "SCC" the standard contractual clauses of the European Commission of 4 June 2021.

Provider Purpose Location of processing Basis for third country
Hetzner Online GmbH, Industriestr. 25, 91710 Gunzenhausen, Germany Servers, database, files and backups of the application and the websites, our own speech recognition for voice messages and the trial call, our own knowledge search Germany (servers in Nuremberg, backups in Falkenstein) no transfer
Twilio Ireland Limited, Dublin, Ireland, with Twilio Inc., San Francisco, USA Phone numbers, call answering, speech recognition, playing the speech output, call recordings (Ireland region); fallback speech output for single sentences that are not generated in time; SMS and WhatsApp sending (USA region) Ireland; USA for SMS, WhatsApp, account data and parts of the control layer DPF; Twilio's Binding Corporate Rules; SCC
integrated through Twilio, as Twilio's sub-processors: Deepgram, Inc., USA (speech recognition), Google LLC, USA (speech recognition for calls in Turkish, Polish and Arabic; standard voice for mandatory notices) and ElevenLabs (fallback speech output through Twilio) Converting speech to text during the call; text to speech only as a fallback, when a sentence is not generated in time through our own ElevenLabs access USA or as stated in Twilio's sub-processor list Contract between Twilio and the provider under Twilio's data protection addendum
ElevenLabs Inc., New York, USA Speech output in every call: turns the text of Marco's replies and of the mandatory notices into speech, with Marco's voice, another chosen voice or an own voice of the controller; likewise in the trial call in the browser and for listening samples. Team voice, only if the controller uses it: creates an artificial voice from voice samples of an employee who has consented and speaks Marco's replies with it USA DPF; SCC
Anthropic Ireland, Limited, Dublin, Ireland, with Anthropic PBC, San Francisco, USA AI language model Claude: understands requests, writes replies and summaries; text recognition in images, where switched on USA SCC
Mailgun Technologies, Inc. (Sinch group), USA, EU region Email channel at mail.hallomarco.com: receiving forwarded emails, sending replies; sending the application's emails (such as confirmations, notifications, invoices) EU (data centres in Germany and Belgium) SCC for account and support data in the USA
Google Ireland Limited, Dublin, Ireland, with Google LLC, Mountain View, USA (Google Maps Platform) Service area and travel time: addresses are converted into coordinates (geocoding) and travel times are calculated (routing), only where switched on EU and USA DPF; SCC
Laravel Holdings Inc., USA (Laravel Forge) Setting up and maintaining the servers and deploying updates; no access to conversation data in normal operation, technical access to the servers possible USA SCC
Laravel Holdings Inc., USA (Laravel Nightwatch) Monitoring errors and performance of the application: error reports and metrics with technical data (identifiers, request paths, IP addresses), no conversation content intended USA or the region chosen SCC

Notes on the list:

  • Payment processing: Stripe Payments Europe, Limited, Dublin, Ireland, processes only the controller's payment and invoice data, partly on our behalf and partly as a controller in its own right (for example for fraud prevention and anti-money-laundering checks); Stripe is certified under the DPF. Stripe receives no caller data.
  • WhatsApp: If the controller uses WhatsApp, the messages also pass through WhatsApp Ireland Limited, Dublin, Ireland (Meta), under the WhatsApp Business terms and WhatsApp's data processing terms, which the controller concludes with WhatsApp itself. Meta also processes data outside the EU. For medical practices, law firms and tax firms, WhatsApp is off by default.
  • Web push: Notifications to the installed app go through the push services of the browser vendors (such as Google, Apple, Mozilla); the user's browser determines which service. They can contain a caller's name or phone number and a short summary of the request and are end-to-end encrypted, so the push services cannot read the content. The push services only transmit and are not sub-processors (clause 8(4)).
  • Certificates: For the subdomain through which a business's links run, we obtain a TLS certificate from Let's Encrypt (Internet Security Research Group, USA) through our server administration. Only the domain name is transmitted, no caller data.
  • Speech output: In every call, ElevenLabs receives the text Marco speaks. It may contain details from the conversation, such as names, phone numbers or appointments. ElevenLabs does not receive callers' voices or recordings. We use ElevenLabs' programming interface (api.elevenlabs.io); processing takes place in the USA. According to its own statements, ElevenLabs is certified under the DPF; ElevenLabs' data processing agreement permits transfers on this basis and contains the SCC. ElevenLabs keeps the inputs and outputs of requests in a history and in logs; a mode without this storage (zero retention) is only offered to selected enterprise customers. Deleted data remains in ElevenLabs' backups for up to 30 days. Under ElevenLabs' terms of use, ElevenLabs may use content to improve its services and models unless the account holder objects. We objected to this use in our ElevenLabs account on 28 October 2026; the objection applies to content from that date onwards. Under the data processing agreement, ElevenLabs processes personal data only on our documented instructions.
  • Team voice: ElevenLabs receives the voice samples once, when the voice is created, and after that the texts Marco speaks with this voice. We delete the voice samples on our side as soon as the voice has been created, and the voice at ElevenLabs as soon as consent is withdrawn, the employee leaves the business or the contract ends.
  • Mandatory notices on the phone (AI notice, recording notice) are spoken by Marco in the voice of the call. We generate them once per voice and wording at ElevenLabs and play them from our server. For an employee's voice, and as long as a notice in the chosen voice is not yet available, a standard voice of our telephony provider speaks it. The notices contain no caller data.
  • According to its terms, our provider for the AI language model does not use data from its programming interface for training and stores it only for a limited time for abuse detection.