Privacy, cookies and how calls are handled

Who operates OnTheBlower

OnTheBlower is a UK telephone answering service run as a sole trader business, not a limited company, so there is no company registration number to quote. The same person who runs it is the data controller for everything described below. Email hello@ontheblower.uk or call 020 4620 6376 and a human answers. We will give you our full registered trading address in writing on request.

How callers are told they are speaking to AI

Your assistant introduces itself as an AI assistant answering for your business, in its opening greeting, on every call. If a caller asks whether they are speaking to a person, it says plainly that it is not. There is no setting that hides this, and we will not build one.

Are calls recorded?

Yes. Calls answered by your assistant are recorded and transcribed, so you can check exactly what was said and so answered minutes can be billed accurately. If you would rather not have recordings kept, email us and we will switch recording off for your account, which leaves you with transcripts and message summaries only. As the business receiving the calls, telling your own callers that calls are recorded, where your own policies require it, is your responsibility.

What we store

• Call recordings and transcripts, for as long as your account is open, so you can look back at any call.
• Message summaries: caller name, number, reason for calling and urgency.
• Your account details: business name, email, assistant settings and your number.
• Billing records, kept for six years because HMRC requires it.

Card details never touch our servers. Stripe holds the card and gives us only a token, the last four digits and the outcome of each charge.

Where it is stored, and who else sees it

The application and its database run on a server in AWS Ireland (eu-west-1). We use a small number of processors to run the service: Telnyx (phone numbers, call carriage, recording, speech recognition and the voice model), Anthropic (the AI that helps build your assistant's instructions), Stripe (payments) and SMTP2GO (transactional email). We do not sell your data, and we do not share it for advertising.

Deleting your data

Email hello@ontheblower.uk from your account address and ask us to delete it. Recordings, transcripts, messages and assistant settings are deleted within 30 days, and your number is released unless you ask us to port it out first. Billing records stay for the six years HMRC requires; nothing else does. You can also ask for a copy of everything we hold and we will send it within a month, free.

Urgent calls and transfers to a human

You decide what counts as urgent, in your own words, when you build your assistant. When a call matches, the assistant tells the caller it is putting them through and transfers the call to the mobile or landline you nominate. If you do not pick up, the caller returns to the assistant and leaves a message rather than being cut off. Transfers are ordinary phone calls, and the transferred part is billed as answered minutes in the usual way.

Cookies

One cookie: the session cookie that keeps you logged in to your dashboard. It is essential, it is not shared, and it is not used to track you. There is no analytics, advertising or third-party tracking on this site, which is why there is no cookie banner to click through.

Complaints

Tell us first, at hello@ontheblower.uk, and we will try to put it right. If you are still not happy you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.