Legal

Privacy policy

Last updated 3 November 2026

1. Who we are

Etvora is an Australian business providing an AI telephone answering service to trades and other sole traders. ABN 94 581 120 600. Contact: hello@etvora.ai.

We are an APP entity under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and handle personal information in accordance with the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs). Although a small-business exemption has historically applied to businesses with an annual turnover under $3 million, that exemption is being phased out and we have chosen to comply in full regardless.

2. Information we collect

About callers (your customers)

• Telephone number — from caller ID.
• Voice audio — the call is recorded where the subscriber has recording enabled.
• Transcript — a text rendering of what the caller said, produced by a speech-to-text provider.
• What they told us — name, callback number, service address, the nature of the job, and its urgency, captured by the AI assistant and stored as structured fields.
• Call metadata — time, duration, which subscriber number was dialled, and whether the call was forwarded.

We collect this only because the caller dialled a subscriber who has engaged us to answer on their behalf. We do not acquire caller information from any other source and we do not build profiles of callers.

About subscribers

• Business name, ABN/ACN, contact name, email address, mobile number and service area.
• Business profile details used to answer calls — services offered, trading hours, after-hours policy, industry terminology, and a customised greeting.
• Billing details, held by our payment processor (see §5). We do not store card numbers.
• Account credentials and sign-in records.
• Usage records — minutes consumed, calls answered, notifications sent.

3. Sensitive information

We do not seek sensitive information and have no need for it. Callers sometimes volunteer details that could be sensitive — a medical situation, a disability access requirement, or a domestic circumstance. Where that happens it is captured incidentally in a transcript, is treated with the same protections as any other personal information, is never used for any secondary purpose, and is deleted on the same schedule as the rest of the call record.

4. How we use it

• To answer the call, take the message, and deliver it to the subscriber — the only reason the caller rang.
• To generate the recording, transcript and summary the subscriber pays for.
• To detect life-safety situations so the assistant can direct a caller to Triple Zero (000).
• To bill subscribers accurately and reconcile usage.
• To operate, secure, debug and improve the service.
• To meet legal and regulatory obligations, including telecommunications requirements.

We do not sell personal information. We do not use caller information for advertising, and we do not use it to train machine learning models. Subscriber information is not used for marketing beyond service-related communication about their own account.

5. Cross-border disclosure — read this section carefully

Under Australian Privacy Principle 8 we must tell you when personal information is disclosed to recipients outside Australia, and take reasonable steps to ensure they handle it consistently with the APPs. We are being specific rather than hiding behind “trusted third parties”.

Etvora’s own systems — databases, recordings, transcripts, summaries and the dashboard — run on Australian infrastructure in Sydney, and our language models are invoked in-region in Australia. However, the telephone and speech-processing layer necessarily involves overseas recipients. When a call is answered:

• Twilio Inc. (United States) carries the telephone call, performs the speech-to-text and text-to-speech orchestration, and may process the audio and transcript in the United States and other jurisdictions where it operates.
• Deepgram, Inc. (United States) — the speech-to-text provider used by Twilio’s ConversationRelay service. Caller audio and transcripts may be processed by Deepgram.
• ElevenLabs, Inc. — the text-to-speech provider used to voice the assistant’s replies. Text destined for speech may be processed by ElevenLabs.
• Amazon Web Services — hosting and inference. Our production region is Sydney (ap-southeast-2), but AWS is a global provider with corporate entities outside Australia.
• Stripe, Inc. — payment processing for subscribers.

The practical consequence is that call audio and transcripts do leave Australia. This is inherent to using a cloud telephony platform and cannot be avoided while we use one. If that is unacceptable for your customers — for example if you serve government, health or legal clients — tell us before you subscribe, because it is a genuine limitation and we would rather lose the sale than discover it later.

We take reasonable steps under APP 8 by contracting only with established providers that publish their own privacy and data-handling commitments, by limiting what we send them to what is necessary to complete the call, and by not using any of them for secondary purposes such as advertising or model training.

6. Recording and its disclosure to callers

Every call answered by Etvora opens with a spoken announcement that the caller has reached the business’s virtual assistant and that the call may be recorded. Subscribers cannot disable this announcement. This satisfies the disclosure expected under state surveillance devices legislation and the transparency requirement of the APPs, and supports compliance with section 18 of the Australian Consumer Law by ensuring no caller is misled into believing they are speaking with a human.

Subscribers are responsible for ensuring their own use of call recording complies with the law applicable to them, and for not using Etvora in any manner that would mislead callers.

7. Storage and retention

• Call recordings — retained for 30 days (Starter), 90 days (Pro) or 12 months (Business), then permanently deleted.
• Transcripts and summaries — retained while the subscriber’s account is open, and deleted within 30 days of account closure unless we are required by law to keep them.
• Billing records — retained for seven years to meet taxation obligations.
• Account and audit data — retained while the account is open.

Copies of recordings held temporarily by our telephony provider are deleted after transfer to our own storage. We do not keep personal information longer than we need it.

8. Your rights

You may, at any time and free of charge:

• Access the personal information we hold about you (APP 12).
• Correct it if it is inaccurate, out of date or incomplete (APP 13).
• Request deletion — for subscribers, of your account and associated call data; for callers, of any call record concerning you.
• Export your data as CSV or JSON.
• Withdraw consent or cancel, which stops further collection.

Callers: if you rang an Etvora-answered number and want a copy of that call, or want it deleted, email hello@etvora.ai with the number you called, the number you called from, and roughly when. We will action it. You may also ask the business you called directly — they are the controller of that relationship and can instruct us on your behalf.

9. Security

We take reasonable steps to protect personal information from misuse, interference, loss and unauthorised access, modification or disclosure (APP 11): encryption in transit and at rest, least-privilege access controls, network isolation, request signature verification on all telephony callbacks, tenant-level row isolation in our database, secrets held in a managed secret store rather than in code, and recording playback through short-lived signed links.

No system is perfectly secure. If an eligible data breach occurs that is likely to result in serious harm, we will notify affected individuals and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner as required by the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme.

10. Children

Etvora is a business-to-business service and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect information about children. A caller to a subscriber’s number may nonetheless be a minor; such information receives the same protections and is deleted on the same schedule.

11. Not an emergency service

12. Complaints

If you believe we have breached the APPs, email hello@etvora.ai with the subject “Privacy complaint”. We will acknowledge within 5 business days and respond substantively within 30 days. If you are not satisfied, you may complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (oaic.gov.au, 1300 363 992).

13. Changes

We may update this policy. The current version is always at etvora.ai/privacy.html with its revision date at the top. Material changes to how we handle caller information will be notified to subscribers by email.

14. Contact

Etvora — 12 Ellin Street, Doncaster East VIC 3109
hello@etvora.ai
ABN 94 581 120 600