What a chat analyser records about your visit
Portraitor's servers record an address, a browser type and a time of access. The conversation you submitted is not in that record, and two separate clocks run on what is kept.
A chat analyser’s servers record your address, your browser type and the time of your visit. Portraitor’s privacy policy says those access records are kept for thirty days and fault records for ninety, and that conversation content is not retained at all, so the chat you submitted is in neither.
Two different questions get asked as one. What a site keeps inside your browser is the first, and a cookie table answers it. What the servers write down when your browser asks them for a page is the second, and almost nobody publishes it plainly. This page reports only what Portraitor’s own published pages say, and says where they stop.
The conversation is not one of the records
The retention table in the privacy policy lists conversation content as not retained, with the reason given as processed only for the duration of generation, then discarded. Every other record described below is a record of the visit rather than of the chat, and that distinction is the thing worth holding on to while reading the rest.
It matters more here than it would at most services, because of something the same page states twice: the Service does not operate user accounts, and no email address is retained. A visit record at a service with accounts can be joined to a profile, an order history and a login trail. At Portraitor there is no profile for it to be joined to. The nearest thing to an identifier a buyer holds is how a Pass works without an account, which the policy describes as an anonymous code not associated with a name or an email address.
What one request to the server leaves behind
The policy states that the servers record addresses, browser type and times of access for security, and that technical faults are recorded in order to correct them. Three items, then, for an ordinary visit: where the request appeared to come from, what kind of browser made it, and when.
That is a short list by the standards of the category, and the reason it can be short is architectural rather than generous. A service that holds a conversation needs a record tying each stored conversation to the person who owns it. A service that discards the conversation at the end of generation has nothing to tie, so the server record has no second job to do beyond keeping the thing available and unabused.
What the policy does not do is describe the layout of a log line. It names the categories it collects, which is the claim a reader can rely on, and it does not publish a field list. Anyone who needs that level of detail should ask for it rather than infer it from this page.
Why an address kept in a fault record cannot name you
The most specific sentence on this subject is also the most unusual. Where an address is retained in the fault records, the policy says, it is held in an irreversible form that allows Portraitor to establish whether a series of failures originates from one visitor or several, but does not enable it to identify that visitor.
Read closely, that sentence describes a record built for exactly one comparison and no others. Are these twenty errors one person retrying, or twenty people hitting the same wall? Same stored value means the same origin; a different value means a different one. The question a support queue actually needs answered is answerable. The question of whose address it was is not, because the stored form cannot be turned back into the address it came from.
This is a checkable claim rather than a reassurance, and it is checkable in the obvious way: the same page sets out a rights procedure, and how to ask for your data to be erased describes what can and cannot be produced under it. A value that genuinely cannot be reversed is a value nobody can hand back to you either, and the policy is consistent with itself on that point rather than promising both.
What the policy does not say is how the irreversible form is produced. A reader who wants to know whether it is salted, and salted per period or once, will not find that on the published pages. The claim on offer is the property, not the method.
Thirty days, ninety days, and what each clock is for
The retention table gives server access logs thirty days, for security and prevention of abuse. It gives technical fault records ninety days, and notes that addresses inside them are held in the irreversible form described above. Payment confirmations get thirty days, for verifying that each payment is applied once and once only, and the payment record itself is kept for seven years because tax law requires it, with no name, no email address and no card details in it.
So the longest clock on anything touching a visit is ninety days, and the only seven year record is a financial one the policy says carries nothing identifying in it. A reader comparing services will find that worth lining up against who can reach your chat at each service, because retention windows are where published positions diverge most and marketing copy diverges least.
One scope point belongs in the same breath as those numbers. The policy says the hosting provider takes a copy of the database roughly daily and keeps each copy for about a month, so a record deleted from the live database can persist in those copies for up to a month before they expire. The same sentence states that the copies hold the same records as the live database and nothing more, with no conversation text and no portrait in them.
What this page does not settle
The four pages Portraitor publishes answer what is collected and for how long. They do not answer every question a careful reader will have, and the honest thing is to name the gaps rather than fill them with a confident sentence. The field contents of an access log line are not published. The method behind the irreversible form is not published. Whether a browser type recorded today is still useful in week four is not addressed at all.
Nor does reporting a clause amount to advice about your own position. What these records mean for a particular person in a particular jurisdiction is a question for someone qualified to answer it, and this page deliberately stops at what the page says.
Finally, the browser side of the question is a separate subject with a separate answer, and mixing the two is how people end up believing a site holds either everything or nothing. If the cookies are what you came for, which cookies a chat analyser sets in your browser covers them, and if the geography is the worry, where the processing actually happens covers that.
If what you want is the portrait rather than the policy, Portraitor states what it takes and what it returns before you pay anything.
Frequently asked questions
Frequently asked questions
Does a chat analyser keep my IP address?
Portraitor’s privacy policy says its servers record addresses, browser type and times of access, and that server access logs are kept for thirty days. Where an address is retained in a fault record, the policy says it is held in an irreversible form, and those records are kept for ninety days.
Is my conversation in the server logs?
No. The retention table lists conversation content as not retained, and gives the reason as processed only for the duration of generation, then discarded. The records described on this page are records of the visit, not of the chat.
How long does Portraitor keep a record of my visit?
Thirty days for server access logs and ninety days for technical fault records, according to the retention table on the privacy policy. Payment confirmations are kept for thirty days and the payment record for seven years, which the policy says contains no name, no email address and no card details.
Can a record still sit in a backup after it is deleted?
Yes, for up to about a month. The policy says the hosting provider copies the database roughly daily and keeps each copy for about a month, so a deleted record can persist there until the copy expires. It also says those copies contain no conversation text and no portrait.
Is this the same as the cookie question?
No. Cookies are set in your browser and are listed in a cookie table. The records on this page are written by the servers when your browser asks them for a page. The two are answered by different sections of the policy and neither answers the other.
A visit leaves an address, a browser type and a time, and thirty days later the access record of it is gone.
What a portrait costs you in records
One upload, no account, and an access record that expires in thirty days. Portraitor states what it keeps before you pay.
See what it takes