Privacy Policy

Two different groups of people interact with WhaleRing, and it matters which one you are:

• Our customers: home-services businesses (HVAC contractors and similar) who hire us to answer their phones.
• Callers: the members of the public who call one of our customers' business lines and reach our answering service.

If you are a caller, the business you dialed is the owner of your information. We process it on their behalf, and their own privacy practices apply to what they do with it afterward.

In the language of privacy law: WhaleRing LLC is the controller of the information we hold about our own business customers, and a processor acting on a customer's instructions for the caller information we collect on their behalf.

From callers, during a phone call:

• Audio recordings of the call
• Written transcripts of the call
• Name, callback phone number, service address, and a description of the problem you are calling about
• The date, time, and duration of the call

From our customers, when they sign up:

• Business name, contact name, email address, phone number, and service area
• Configuration details such as business hours, what counts as an emergency, and who should receive urgent notifications
• Billing information, which is processed by our payment processor. We do not store full card numbers

From visitors to this website:

• Aggregate, privacy-friendly analytics: page views, scroll depth, and which buttons were clicked. This does not use cookies to track you across other websites and does not build an advertising profile of you.

Calls answered by our service are recorded and transcribed. Recordings exist so that our customers have an accurate record of what a caller asked for, and so that we can find and fix problems with how the service handled a call.

Arizona is a one-party consent state for call recording. Our customers are responsible for meeting any recording-disclosure obligations that apply to their business, including in other states, and our terms require them to do so. If you are a caller and you do not want to be recorded, hang up and contact the business by another method, or tell the service and it will note your request.

• To answer the call, work out whether it is urgent, and collect the details the business needs
• To notify the business about urgent calls, and to send summaries of everything else
• To book routine appointments into the business's calendar
• To improve how a specific customer's answering service performs, by reviewing calls and correcting mistakes
• To bill our customers and provide support

We do not use call recordings or transcripts to train general-purpose AI models for third parties.

What we send. Two kinds of message. Operational alerts to our business customers about calls to their business, including urgent ones. And follow-up messages to consumers who called one of our business customers and did not reach anyone.

How we get consent. Business customers agree in writing during onboarding. Consumers consent by calling the business first: we reply only to that specific call, and we never message anyone who has not called us first.

Frequency. Message frequency varies, and depends on how many calls come in.

Cost. Message and data rates may apply.

Opting out. Reply STOP to any message to stop immediately. STOP is honored permanently. Reply HELP for assistance. Opting out of texts does not cancel the service; email us to do that.

Mobile information will not be sold or shared with third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes. All other categories of information are subject to the sharing terms described elsewhere in this policy.

We do not send marketing text messages.

Questions about our messaging. Email r.mizuno@whalering.com.

Current status. SMS alerts begin once our carrier registration is approved. Until then we alert customers by email.

We do not sell your personal information. We share it only with:

• The business you called. Callers' details go to the business that owns the line, which is the entire point of the service.
• Service providers that make the product work: our voice and language-model providers, telephony and SMS carriers, calendar providers, hosting, and payment processing. They are permitted to use the data only to provide their service to us.
• Legal requirements. If we are required by law, subpoena, or court order to disclose information, we will.
• A successor, if the business is ever sold or merged. You would be told before your information moved.

Call recordings and transcripts are retained for 12 months by default, then deleted. Customers can ask for a shorter retention period, or for specific recordings to be deleted sooner, and we will honor it.

Customer account and billing records are kept for as long as the account is open, and afterward for as long as tax and accounting rules require.

Data is encrypted in transit and at rest by our hosting and telephony providers, and access is limited to the people who need it. In practice, that is WhaleRing LLC and its staff. No system is perfectly secure, and we will not claim otherwise. If a breach affects your information, we will notify affected parties as required by law.

You can ask us to tell you what information we hold about you, correct it, or delete it. Email r.mizuno@whalering.com and we will respond within 30 days. If you are a caller, we may need to refer your request to the business you called, since it is their record.

Depending on where you live, you may have additional rights under laws such as the California Consumer Privacy Act. We extend the core rights above to everyone regardless of location.

This service is for businesses. It is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect their information. A child's details may incidentally appear in a call, for example a caller mentioning that a young child is in an overheated house, and that information is treated like the rest of the call record.

If this policy changes in a way that matters, we will update the effective date at the top and notify active customers by email.

WhaleRing LLC is a limited liability company organized under the laws of the State of Texas, United States.

Questions, requests, or complaints: r.mizuno@whalering.com