Google Voice

Privacy Policy

March 10th, 2009

The Google Privacy Policy describes how we treat personal information when you use Google's products and services, including information provided when you use Google Voice. In addition, the following describes our privacy practices that are specific to Google Voice.

Personal information

  • You need a Google Account to access Google Voice. Google asks for some personal information when you create a Google Account, including your alternate contact information and a password, which is used to protect your account from unauthorized access. A Google Account allows you to access many of our services that require registration. You will also be asked to choose a Google Voice phone number that will be assigned for your use, and any forwarding telephone numbers that may be used in conjunction with the service.
  • Google Voice stores, processes and maintains your call history, voicemail greeting(s), voicemail messages, Short Message Service (SMS) messages, recorded conversations, and other data related to your account in order to provide the service to you.
  • When you use Google Voice, Google's servers automatically record certain information about your use of Google Voice. Similar to other web services, Google Voice records information such as account activity (including storage usage, number of log-ins), data displayed or clicked on (including UI elements, links); and other log information (including browser type, IP-address, date and time of access, cookie ID, and referrer URL). Google's servers also automatically collect telephony log information (including calling-party number, forwarding numbers, time and date of calls, duration of calls, SMS routing information, and types of calls).

Uses

  • Google maintains and processes your Google Voice account and its contents to provide the Google Voice service to you and to improve our services.
  • Google's computers process the information in your messages for various purposes, including formatting and displaying the information to you, playing you your messages, backing up your messages, and other purposes relating to offering you Google Voice.
  • Google may send you information related to your Google Voice account or other Google services.
  • Voicemail Transcription - if you use Google Voice's voicemail transcription service, Google may transcribe voicemail messages into text and email and/or SMS the resulting text to the email account or phone number(s) designated in your user settings. Google's computers process the information in your messages for various purposes, including formatting and displaying the information to you, delivering related links, backing up your messages, and other purposes relating to offering you Google Voice.

Information sharing and onward transfer

  • We do not sell, rent or otherwise share your personal information with any third parties except in the limited circumstances described in the Google Privacy Policy, such as when we believe we are required to do so by law.

Your choices

  • You may change your Google Voice account settings and you may upgrade or downgrade your account through the "settings" section.
  • You may organize or delete your call history, voicemail greeting(s), voicemail messages (both audio and/or transcriptions), Short Message Service (SMS) messages, and recorded conversations through your Google Voice account or terminate your account through the Google Account section of Google Voice settings. Such deletions or terminations will take immediate effect in your account view. Residual copies of deleted data and accounts may take up to 90 days to be deleted from our active servers and may remain in our offline backup systems. Call history for billable calls will remain visible on your account and be retained in Google systems for accounting purposes. Call history for billable calls will be retained in Google systems for accounting purposes.

More information

Google adheres to the US Safe Harbor privacy principles. For more information about the Safe Harbor framework or our registration, see the Department of Commerce's web site.

For questions concerning the product or your account, please check out the Google Help page.