Privacy Policy

Pickup is a phone answering service: a business connects its phone line to Pickup, and an AI receptionist answers calls, takes down what a caller needs, and can check availability and book appointments on a connected calendar. This policy covers what Pickup itself collects and does with data while running that service. The business using Pickup is responsible for its own obligations to its customers and callers beyond what’s described here — this page is about Pickup’s own practices as the company operating the phone system.

On a call, Pickup collects:

• The call’s audio recording and a text transcript.
• Whatever the caller says that’s relevant to why they’re calling — name, callback number, and the details of what they need, exactly as they describe them.

From the business itself, Pickup collects what’s entered while setting up: business name, services offered, hours, team members, and the rules the business wants its receptionist to follow. If the business connects a Google Calendar (see below), Pickup also stores the credential needed to check and book on that calendar — never the calendar’s contents beyond what a booking requires.

Pickup’s receptionist states at the start of every call that it’s a virtual receptionist and that the call is being recorded, and why. If a caller objects, the receptionist offers to take a message instead rather than continuing to record. This isn’t a setting a business can turn off — it happens on every call, every time.

Pickup doesn’t build its own phone or AI infrastructure from scratch — it’s built on a small number of named services, each doing one real job:

• Vapi places and receives the actual phone call, and handles speech-to-text and text-to-speech for it (via its own sub-processors, including Deepgram for transcription).
• OpenAI (GPT-4.1) is the model having the actual conversation with the caller in real time.
• Anthropic (Claude) never talks to a caller live — it’s used afterward, reading a call’s transcript to help set up a new receptionist’s rules and to flag moments in a finished call worth a business owner’s attention.
• Supabase is the database everything above is stored in, and handles account login for the business’s dashboard.
• Google Calendar — only for businesses that choose to connect it. See the dedicated section below.

In their dashboard, a business can set how long call recordings are kept (3 to 24 months) and can opt in to sharing anonymized call patterns to help improve Pickup for other businesses in their industry — off by default, and never offered at all to law-firm accounts, given the sensitivity of privileged calls. These are real preferences the business sets, honestly described here as exactly that: configurable settings, not a claim that every recording is automatically deleted the moment a retention window passes.

When a business connects Google Calendar, Pickup requests one narrow permission — calendar.events — which only allows reading free/busy time and creating events. Pickup never requests access to the rest of a Google account, and never sees the connecting owner’s Google password. What’s stored is a single encrypted credential used to act on the calendar going forward; it’s encrypted before it’s ever written to the database and is only decrypted server-side, in the moment a call needs to check availability or create a booking. A business can disconnect at any time from Settings, which deletes that credential; access can also be revoked directly from the connected Google account’s own permissions page at any time.

Data moves over encrypted connections (HTTPS) throughout. The Google Calendar credential described above is encrypted at rest. Access to a business’s own data in the dashboard is restricted to that business’s own account.

For questions about this policy, or to ask about data collected on a call, reach out at hello@pickup.com.

If what’s described here changes in a way that matters — new data collected, a new third party, a change in how long something’s kept — this page will be updated and the date at the top will change.