Privacy Policy
1. Who is responsible
Clara Funke, sole proprietorship (Einzelunternehmen) trading as “Tess”, Weinbergsweg 24, 10119 Berlin, Germany. Email: hello@jointess.com
Write to this address for any question about your data, or to use your rights described in section 10.
2. Visiting this website
Hosting. This website is hosted by Vercel. When you open a page, the hosting provider processes your IP address, the date and time, the page requested, the referring page and your browser type, and keeps short-lived server logs. We need this to deliver the website and keep it secure (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).
Fonts. The website loads fonts from Google Fonts (Google Ireland Limited). Your browser connects to Google's servers to do this, which transmits your IP address to Google. Our interest is displaying the website as designed (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).
Light or dark mode. If you switch the theme, your choice is saved in your own browser (local storage) so the page remembers it. It is not sent to us. This is strictly necessary for a feature you asked for (§ 25(2) TDDDG).
We do not use analytics, advertising or tracking tools on this website.
3. Asking Tess to call you
When you ask Tess to call you, we process:
- your first and last name, phone number and email address;
- your LinkedIn profile address, if you enter one, and the LinkedIn data you choose to share with “Connect LinkedIn” (see section 6);
- the consent you give by ticking the box, with its exact wording and the time you gave it;
- your IP address, to limit how many requests can be sent and prevent misuse.
We process this data to place the call you asked for and to introduce you as described in section 5, based on your consent (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR), and to prevent misuse, based on our legitimate interest in protecting the service and the people whose numbers could be entered (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). Tess only calls phone numbers in Europe and is intended for people aged 18 and over. Providing your data is voluntary, but without it Tess cannot call you.
4. Your call with Tess
Tess is an AI, not a person. The call is placed and run through our voice provider, which uses a telephone network provider, speech recognition, a language model and speech synthesis. With your consent, the call is recorded and transcribed (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR). You can end the call at any time, and you can withdraw your consent at any time with effect for the future.
After the call, the transcript is analysed with an AI model to create a short profile: what you are working on, what would help you right now, what you could offer others, and the communities you mention. This helps prepare useful introductions. Please do not share health information or other sensitive data (Art. 9 GDPR) during the call. No decision with legal or similarly significant effects on you is made automatically (Art. 22 GDPR).
5. Introductions
When you ask Tess to call you, you also agree that Tess may introduce you to other people who have talked to Tess through this website, and them to you (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR). This is an open network: it is not limited to one industry, and anyone in it can be introduced to anyone else.
After your call, Tess uses an AI model to look for someone who could genuinely help with something you said you need. To judge that, it uses what people said on their call, what they do and their interests, and the LinkedIn information described in section 6 — so you can be suggested as someone who could help even if you never said so explicitly. Tess only makes an introduction when it finds a strong fit; weaker fits are kept as a record of what was considered, and nobody is contacted about them.
- Tess emails the person who is looking for help with the other person's name and LinkedIn profile (or, without a LinkedIn profile, their first name and a short description of what they do), explains why they would be a good match, and asks whether to make the introduction.
- If they say yes, Tess emails the other person in the same way, with the first person's name and LinkedIn profile, and asks whether they would like to be introduced.
- Only when both have said yes does Tess share your email addresses, in one email to both of you.
This means your name, your LinkedIn profile and a short explanation of why you could be a good match can be shared with another person before you have been asked about that particular introduction. Your email address and phone number are never shared before both of you have said yes, and nothing you asked Tess to keep to itself during the call is included.
These emails are written with the help of an AI model and are sent automatically, without a person reading them first. You answer by replying to the email; a person reads the replies and records your answer.
You can say no to any introduction, and you can stop all introductions at any time by replying “STOP”, using the link in every email, or writing to us; this has no disadvantage for you and does not affect the lawfulness of anything before. People who asked for a call before this was part of the tick box are only introduced if they ask for a call again.
6. Your LinkedIn profile
Entering your profile address. If you enter your LinkedIn profile address, we store the address. We do not use it to retrieve any data from LinkedIn.
Connecting LinkedIn. If you choose “Connect LinkedIn”, a LinkedIn window opens where you log in and confirm that you want to share your data with Tess. Only if you confirm there (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR) do we receive, once and through LinkedIn's Member Data Portability API:
- from your profile: headline, “About” text, industry and location;
- your positions, education and skills;
- the posts you have shared.
We keep only the parts that help prepare your call, and use them only to prepare your conversation with Tess. We do not request your messages, contacts, connections or any other LinkedIn data, we do not keep your date of birth or address, and we do not keep access to your LinkedIn account: the access LinkedIn grants is used once and not stored.
If you do not request a call within one hour of connecting, the data we received is deleted. If you do, it is kept with your call request (see section 9) and deleted when you ask us to. You can withdraw your consent at any time with effect for the future by writing to us.
LinkedIn (LinkedIn Ireland Unlimited Company) processes your login and your confirmation under its own privacy policy.
7. Pilot requests and network suggestions
If you ask about using Tess for your network, or suggest a network, we process the details you enter (for example name, role, organisation, network size, email address, phone number and your message) to reply and to discuss a possible collaboration (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR, or Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR based on our interest in answering enquiries).
8. Service providers and transfers
We use the following service providers, who process data on our behalf under data processing terms (Art. 28 GDPR):
| Provider | Purpose | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Vercel | Hosting of this website | USA |
| Railway | Hosting of the Tess application and database | Servers in the EU (Netherlands); company in the USA |
| Google (Google Fonts) | Fonts on this website | Ireland / USA |
| Vapi | Running the phone call, recording and transcription | USA |
| Twilio | Telephone connection | USA |
| Deepgram | Speech recognition during the call | USA |
| OpenAI | Language model during the call | USA |
| Anthropic | Analysing the transcript after the call, finding good introductions and drafting introduction emails | USA |
Where data is processed outside the EU/EEA, this happens on the basis of an adequacy decision of the European Commission, in particular the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework for certified providers, or on the basis of EU Standard Contractual Clauses (Art. 44 ff. GDPR). You can request a copy of the relevant safeguards from us.
Apart from these providers, we only disclose data to other people as described in section 5, or to authorities where we are legally required to.
9. How long we keep your data
- Call requests, recordings, transcripts and profiles: until you ask us to delete them, or until they are no longer needed for the purpose they were collected for, whichever comes first. When we delete a call, we also delete it at our voice provider.
- Records of your consent: for as long as we keep the data the consent covers, and afterwards only as long as needed to prove that consent was given.
- Pilot requests and network suggestions: until the enquiry has been dealt with, unless a collaboration follows.
- Server logs: for a short period set by our hosting providers.
Where commercial or tax law requires us to keep documents such as contracts or invoices, we keep them for the legally required period.
10. Your rights
You have the right to access, rectification, erasure, restriction of processing and data portability (Art. 15–18 and 20 GDPR), and you can withdraw your consent at any time with effect for the future (Art. 7(3) GDPR). To use these rights, email hello@jointess.com.
Right to object (Art. 21 GDPR): You can object at any time, on grounds relating to your particular situation, to processing based on Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR.
You can also lodge a complaint with a data protection supervisory authority, for example the Berliner Beauftragte für Datenschutz und Informationsfreiheit, Alt-Moabit 59–61, 10555 Berlin, Germany.
11. Changes to this policy
We update this policy when Tess changes how it processes data. The date at the top shows when it was last changed.