Flow Legal Disclosures

At Tidio, we actively pay attention to the legal matters around chatbots to provide you with the most recent updates and legislation around the topic of Artificial Intelligence (AI). This article explains how to create GDPR-friendly flows and comply with the SB-1001 Bots: disclosure.

In this article, you'll learn:

• How to create GDPR-friendly flows
• What is the Bot Disclosure and Accountability Act, and how to obey it

GDPR-Friendly Flows

To make some of the workflows compliant with the GDPR laws in Europe, we suggest you add a step to your workflow to ask visitors and future leads for consent. Below, we describe how to do that. 

The Decision node helps us ask for consent.

From there, we can use the Based on contact property node to continue the workflow only when a user gives their consent.

In this example, the workflow will continue only for users who permitted us. Their answers are saved in the Contacts, under the Contact Properties section.

 

 

Another option to comply with the GDPR is to use the dedicated field in the Pre-chat survey. Learn more about it our Pre-chat Survey article.

The Bot Disclosure and Accountability Act

On July 1, 20219, the state of California has enacted the BOT act to prevent deceptive practices for commercial and political bots. The law states that it's illegal to mislead the other person to incentivize a purchase or sale of goods or vote in an election. However, It's still unclear whether bots such as Tidio Flows providing technical assistance or solely answering technical questions are subject to the BOT Act.

Since the disclosure obligation rests on the person who created the bot/flow, we have prepared the guidelines for complying with the act. The guidelines should be considered by the Tidio users whose bots will interact with another person online in the state of California.

It's important to distinguish between bots and humans

To comply with the act, the person talking to the chatbot needs to be aware the conversation is automated and processed by the chatbot. 

• We recommend using a sentence such as "Hi! I'm a bot!" at the beginning of the flow. 
• Try not to give your bots a human photo or human name that could mislead the visitor.

We will be monitoring the regulations for further updates.