Privacy Policy

1. Who this policy covers

This policy applies to people who interact with Ambix in the United States, including:

• Liquor-store owners and employees using Ambix Station on an iPad register, Ambix Daisho on an iPhone, and the Nexus portal in a browser.
• Visitors to our website who request a demo or browse our marketing pages.

Ambix is sold business-to-business: store owners are our customers. The data your store collects from your shoppers (loyalty members, age-verification records, purchase history) is your data — we process it on your behalf as a service provider.

2. Information we collect

2.1 Information you provide

• Demo requests (website): Your name, email, and phone number when you submit our demo form.
• Device activation (Station & Daisho): The identifier of the iPad or iPhone activating your store's account, and the device name.
• Owner/employee accounts: Employee name, role (Admin / Manager / Cashier), and a hashed-and-salted PIN. We do not store PINs in plain text.
• Store profile: Store name, address, phone, tax rate, printer settings, and similar configuration.
• Subscription billing (store owners): When you subscribe, billing details (card number, billing address) are entered directly with our PCI-DSS-compliant payment processor. We receive only a customer reference and subscription status — never your full card number.
• Owner corrections & lab feedback (Daisho): When an owner corrects something the AI invoice parser got wrong (e.g., a vendor name), we save the original and corrected values so we can improve future parses.

2.2 Information generated by your use of the products

• Sales & inventory data (Ambix Station): Transactions, line items, prices, quantities, payment method (cash/credit/debit), employee on-duty, register, and timestamp.
• Customer records the store creates (Ambix Station): If your store enrolls a customer in its loyalty program, the store may save a phone number, optional name, optional birthday, optional email, points balance, tier, last-visit date, and marketing-consent state.
• Audit logs: Employee actions inside Station (sign-in, voids, discounts, age verifications, inventory edits) with timestamps. Audit entries record the employee involved and the action; they do not record the customer's identity.
• Aggregated dashboards (Daisho): Today's revenue, transaction counts, average ticket, hourly breakdowns, low-stock alerts, and approvals — synced from the store's registers.
• Invoice scans (Station & Daisho): Photos of distributor invoices that owners scan to update inventory. Images are sent to our cloud parser and the structured fields (vendor, line items, totals) are saved to the store's records. See Section 7.

2.3 Information collected automatically

• Device and connection data: Device type (iPad or iPhone), device name, app version, operating-system version, and IP address are observed when your apps connect to our servers.
• Push-notification tokens: When you enable notifications in Daisho, Apple or Firebase issues a token that lets us deliver alerts such as low stock and approval requests. Tokens are not used for advertising.
• Crash and error logs: If an app crashes, the operating system or Firebase infrastructure may transmit a stack trace so we can diagnose the bug. Crash reports do not include sales, customer records, or ID-scan data.

2.4 What we do not collect

• We do not store images of driver's licenses or passports. When age is verified at the register, we read the date of birth and expiration from the ID, confirm the customer is 21+, and immediately discard the image and any name, address, or document number that was on the ID. Only a pass/fail audit record (with the employee who performed the check, the verification method, and a timestamp) is retained.
• We do not collect precise location. None of our apps request GPS access.
• We do not use the microphone, contacts, calendar, health, or photo library beyond the limited uses described in this policy (e.g., picking an invoice image to scan).
• We do not sell personal information.
• We do not collect Apple's advertising identifier (IDFA) and we do not run any advertising SDKs in our apps.

3. How we use information

We use the information described above to:

• Provide, operate, and synchronize Station, Daisho, and the Nexus portal across your registers and devices.
• Authenticate users and tie a store's account to the devices it has activated.
• Process subscription payments through our PCI-DSS-compliant payment processor and prevent fraud and abuse.
• Help store owners run their business — sales reports, inventory, employee timekeeping, and AI-assisted invoice parsing.
• Verify that customers buying age-restricted products are 21 or older, and produce a compliance audit trail.
• Improve our AI invoice parser using corrections and labeled examples submitted by owners.
• Detect, investigate, and respond to security incidents, bugs, and abuse.
• Comply with our legal obligations, including federal and state alcohol-control laws.

We do not use your information to build advertising profiles, sell to third parties, or train general-purpose AI models on your data.

4. How we share information

We share information only with the categories of recipients below. All of them but one are needed to operate the service; the exception is the aggregated market data described below, which we sell for our own commercial benefit.

• Cloud infrastructure — Google Firebase: All three apps use Google Firebase (Firestore database, Cloud Functions, Cloud Storage, Authentication, App Check, and Cloud Messaging) to store, synchronize, and secure data. Firebase data is hosted in U.S. Google Cloud regions.
• Payment processor (subscription billing): Subscription billing for store owners is handled by a third-party, PCI-DSS Level 1 certified payment processor. The processor collects card details directly from you; Ambix receives only a customer reference, the last four digits, the card brand, and subscription status. We will name the processor here once billing is live.
• AI invoice parsing — Anthropic: When you scan a distributor invoice in Station or Daisho, the image is sent through our Cloud Function to Anthropic's Claude API for text extraction. We do not include any customer names, payment data, or ID-scan output in invoice images. See Section 7.
• Public product data: When a UPC barcode is scanned in Station, we may query Open Food Facts or UPC Item DB to look up the product's name and image. The only thing we send is the UPC code.
• Push notifications — Apple & Firebase Cloud Messaging: Notification tokens are exchanged with Apple Push Notification service and Firebase Cloud Messaging to deliver in-app alerts you have enabled.
• Brands, distributors and suppliers — aggregated market data: We combine transaction data across stores into area-level market data (for example, how a product category moves in a geographic area) and sell it to brands, distributors, suppliers and market-research firms. We never sell it to a business that operates retail stores — not to another store, and not back to the store it came from. This describes an area, never a store, and it contains no personal information — no shopper names or phone numbers, no purchase histories tied to a person, and no employee data. An area-level figure is released only when it combines at least five (5) contributing stores and no single store accounts for more than 40% of it; otherwise it is rolled up into a wider area or withheld. Buyers are contractually prohibited from attempting to re-identify any store. See Section 6 of the Terms of Service.
• Legal & safety: We may disclose information when we have a good-faith belief it is required by a valid subpoena, warrant, court order, or other legal process, or to protect the rights, property, or safety of Ambix, our users, or the public.
• Business transfers: If Ambix is involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, information may transfer to the successor entity, subject to this policy.

We do not sell or rent personal information, and we do not share it with advertisers or data brokers. The aggregated market data described above is not an exception to this: it contains no personal information, identifies no individual and identifies no store.

5. Payments and PCI-DSS compliance

Ambix is designed so that full card numbers, CVVs, and magnetic-stripe data never touch our servers or any device we control.

• In-store payments (Ambix Station): Cards are read by an external, certified payment terminal that communicates directly with the card processor. Station receives only the tokenized result of the transaction (approval status, last four digits, card brand, and a processor-issued transaction ID). At the time of writing, in-store card processing is being re-integrated; until that is live, Station operates in cash-only mode.
• Subscription billing (license sales): Card details for your Ambix subscription are collected by a third-party, PCI-DSS Level 1 certified payment processor. Ambix's servers never see your full PAN or CVV.
• Daisho and the Nexus portal never handle card data — they display aggregated revenue and reporting only.

Our payment partners (the subscription-billing processor and the certified in-store terminal vendor) maintain PCI-DSS Level 1 certification. Ambix L.L.C. follows PCI-DSS guidance applicable to merchants that use validated, out-of-scope payment integrations, including network segmentation, encrypted-in-transit data, and least-privilege access to systems that handle transaction metadata.

6. Age verification & ID scanning

Selling alcohol responsibly is the entire reason Ambix exists. To help store owners comply with state and federal law:

• Cashiers can scan a customer's driver's license (PDF417 barcode) or passport (machine-readable zone). The image is processed on the device using Apple's Vision framework.
• We extract only the date of birth and expiration date, calculate whether the customer is 21+, and check that the ID has not expired.
• The full image, the customer's name, address, document number, and any other ID field are discarded immediately after the check. They are never written to disk, never uploaded to the cloud, and never transmitted to any third party.
• The audit trail saved to the store's records contains only: the employee who performed the check, the method (license-barcode, passport-MRZ, or manual), the result (pass/fail), and a timestamp.

7. AI-assisted invoice parsing

To save owners hours of manual data entry, Ambix Station and Daisho can scan distributor invoices and automatically extract vendor, line items, quantities, costs, and totals. Here is how that works:

• You take a photo (or several photos for multi-page invoices) of a paper invoice.
• The image is JPEG-compressed and sent over HTTPS to our Firebase Cloud Function, which forwards it to Anthropic's Claude API for extraction.
• Anthropic processes the image, returns structured JSON, and (per their commercial terms) does not retain the input or use it to train their general-purpose models.
• We save the structured fields and an anonymized parse log to your store's records. The original image is not retained on our servers after parsing succeeds.
• If you correct a parsed field (e.g., a misread vendor name), the correction is stored as feedback so we can improve future parses. Owner corrections do not include customer or payment data.

8. Data retention

• Sales, inventory, employee, and audit data is retained for as long as your store keeps an active Ambix subscription, plus a reasonable wind-down period after cancellation. Owners may request export or deletion at any time.
• Age-verification audit logs are retained as long as required by applicable state alcohol-control law (typically 1–3 years), then deleted.
• Invoice scan images are deleted after a successful parse; only the structured data and an anonymized parse log are kept.
• Demo-form leads are retained until we have completed our outreach, or for up to 24 months, whichever is shorter.
• Backups may persist for a short additional period (typically up to 30 days) before being overwritten on schedule.

9. Security

We take reasonable and appropriate steps to protect your information, including:

• HTTPS/TLS for all data in transit between apps, our cloud, our payment processor, and Anthropic.
• Server-side rules on every Firestore collection that limit reads and writes to authenticated users tied to the correct store.
• App Check on our apps and website to deter abuse from non-genuine clients.
• Employee PINs stored as salted bcrypt hashes — never plaintext.
• Credentials and similar secrets stored on-device in the iOS Keychain, scoped to "this device only."
• Least-privilege admin access, scoped by email, on all administrative cloud functions.

No system is perfectly secure. If we ever discover a breach that affects your personal information, we will notify you and the appropriate authorities as required by U.S. federal and state law.

10. Your choices and rights

U.S. residents have the following choices over their information. State law may give you additional rights — see the state-specific notices below.

• Access & export: Email us and we will provide a copy of the personal information we hold about you in a machine-readable format.
• Correction: Store owners can correct employee and customer records inside Station or the Nexus portal. For anything else, email us and we will correct it.
• Deletion: You can ask us to delete your account and associated personal information. We may retain records required by law (for example, age-verification audit logs or tax records).
• Marketing opt-out: You can unsubscribe from marketing emails at any time and turn off push notifications in iOS Settings.
• Do Not Sell or Share: We do not sell or share personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising. There is nothing to opt out of.

State-specific notices

If you are a resident of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Iowa, Indiana, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, or Virginia, you may have additional rights under your state's privacy law, including the right to access, correct, delete, and obtain a portable copy of your personal information, and the right to appeal a denial. Contact us at privacy@ambix.industries to exercise any of these rights. We will verify your request using the information we already have on file and respond within the time required by your state's law (generally 45 days).

California "Shine the Light": California Civil Code § 1798.83 permits California residents to request a notice describing the categories of personal information we have shared with third parties for their direct marketing purposes. We do not share personal information for third-party direct marketing.

11. Children & minimum age

Ambix Station, Ambix Daisho and the Nexus portal are business tools used by store owners and their employees. They are not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13. If you believe a child under 13 has provided us information, contact us and we will delete it.

Separately, Station verifies that a customer buying age-restricted products is 21 or older. That is described in Section 6, and the scan result is kept as a compliance record rather than as a customer profile.

12. SMS, email & push notifications

• Loyalty messaging: If your participating store enables marketing SMS or email through its Ambix loyalty program, you will be asked to opt in before any marketing message is sent. You can text STOP to any marketing SMS or click "unsubscribe" in any marketing email to opt out at any time.
• Push notifications: Daisho may send push notifications such as low stock and approval requests. You can disable push notifications in iOS Settings at any time. We do not use push notifications for advertising.

13. Where your data is processed

Ambix is a U.S. company and our products are offered only in the United States. Personal information is processed and stored in the United States on Google Cloud and Firebase infrastructure. If you access the apps from outside the United States, you are transferring your information to the U.S.

14. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as our products change or to reflect new legal requirements. When we make a material change, we will update the "Last Updated" date at the top of this page and, where appropriate, give you notice through the apps or by email. Your continued use of Ambix after a change takes effect means you accept the updated policy.

15. Contact us

If you have questions about this policy, want to exercise any of the rights described above, or want to report a privacy concern, please reach out:

This policy is provided in plain English to help our customers understand it. It is not a substitute for legal advice. If a court determines that any provision of this policy is unenforceable, the remaining provisions remain in full force and effect.