On Reception
Privacy
Last updated 14 September 2026
On Reception answers the phone for small businesses. This page says what that means for the people who ring them.
We do not record calls
There is no recording, of any call, at any point. What a caller says is turned into text so the receptionist can answer it, and the audio is never written down or kept. There is nothing to leak, subpoena, or accidentally publish, because it does not exist.
What is kept, and for how long
- What callers said, as text — 90 days. After that the words are erased. If the owner supplies a live answer by text, that answer follows the same schedule.
- What they asked about — indefinitely, without the words. The business can see that forty people asked about Saturday hours over a year. It cannot see, after ninety days, how any one of them phrased it.
- Phone numbers given for a callback are kept with the call, and in the text sent to the business, and erased from both on the same ninety-day schedule.
- Appointments the business books — a name, a time and, where one was given, a phone number — are kept as the business’s own records, the way a written diary would be, until the business deletes them. A cancelled appointment is erased after ninety days, because it is no longer a record of anything.
- The business’s own answers — hours, prices, policies — are kept until the business deletes them. They are the product.
Service providers
We use service providers for telephone carriage and transcription, language processing, speech synthesis, hosting, storage and backup, transactional email, monitoring, and payment processing. They receive only the information needed for their job. Suppliers may change as the service changes. We do not sell personal information or use an advertising network.
Business accounts and billing
We keep the owner’s email address, account settings, acceptance of our terms, and operational logs needed to secure and support the service. Our payment processor handles card details; On Reception receives customer, subscription, payment-status, and invoice identifiers rather than the full card number.
Text messages
A business owner may get a text when somebody wanted calling back, and may text or ring their assistant about their own diary. If a caller asks us to send an owner’s delayed answer, we retain their number, the question, their consent, and the answer long enough to send that one message, and deletes the caller’s text permission and number after ninety days. Replying STOP ends messages. The full terms are on the messaging page.
Asking for a copy, or deletion
Write to privacy@onreception.com and we will send what is held about you, or delete it, within thirty days. Closing a business account deletes its operational data. Payment processors and we may retain limited transaction or agreement records where required for tax, accounting, fraud prevention, or legal claims.
Children
On Reception is sold to businesses and is not directed at anybody under 18.