Privacy Policy
Last Updated: July 2026
1. Introduction
Guidecall respects your privacy and is committed to protecting your personal data. This Privacy Policy informs you as to how we look after your personal data when you visit our website, use our application, or utilize our services, and tells you about your privacy rights. We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time; we will notify you of material changes by posting the revised policy on our website and updating the "Last Updated" date above. Your continued use of the platform after the revised policy is posted constitutes your acceptance of the changes. You must be at least 18 years old to create an account or use any of our services. We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 18.
2. The Data We Collect About You
We may collect, use, store, and transfer different kinds of personal data about you, including data you provide directly and data collected automatically (such as IP address, browser type, device identifiers, and access logs):
- Identity Data: First name, last name, username, profile images, and (for Guides, meaning service providers who offer fishing, boating, or outdoor guide services through the platform) legal business name.
- Contact Data: Email address, telephone numbers, and billing or business addresses.
- Financial Data: Securely tokenized payment details handled natively by our PCI-compliant payment processor. Guidecall does not directly store credit card numbers or bank account credentials.
- Transaction Data: Details about payments to and from you, including booking history, refunds, credits, payouts, tips, and disputes.
- Location Data: Geolocation coordinates and reverse-geocoded place labels, used to match Guides with Clients (customers who book guide services), render nearby-results rows, and display meetup locations. You may disable location sharing through your browser or device settings at any time.
- Uploaded Documents & Images: Guides upload credential documents (government photo ID, USCG captain's license, insurance certificate, boat registration, state fishing-guide license, federal permits, vessel photographs, profile images). Customers may upload profile images. Credential documents are visible only to Guidecall admins for compliance review; profile images are public.
- Communications: Messages exchanged with the other party in a booking thread, notes attached to bookings, and your interactions with our customer support.
- Trip Participant Data: When someone books an In-Person Trip for a group, they provide each participant's name (and optionally an email or phone number, used only to deliver that participant's waiver signing link and reminders). Participants who sign the liability waiver also provide a typed signature, and we record the signing time, IP address, and browser details as part of the signed legal record. Participants do not need a Guidecall account. See Sections 10 and 12 for how this data is retained and deleted.
- Notification Preferences: Your per-category email and SMS opt-in selections, and your SMS consent status.
- Reviews & Ratings: Star ratings and written reviews you submit after sessions. Reviews are public on the Guide's profile and include your first name and profile image unless you have enabled anonymous mode for that session at booking time.
3. Third-Party Service Providers
We rely on the following categories of third-party processors to operate the platform (current providers are listed for transparency and may be updated from time to time). Each provider receives only the data needed to perform its function and is bound by its own privacy and security obligations.
- Clerk — user authentication, sign-in/sign-up, and session management. Receives your email and any sign-in provider tokens.
- Payment processor — card processing for customer payments. Receives payment-card details (tokenized in the browser; we never see raw card numbers) and transaction metadata.
- Payout & tax processing — to deliver Guide payouts and meet tax-reporting obligations, we and our banking and payment providers collect Guide identity and payout information (legal name, address, taxpayer identification, and bank-account details).
- Twilio — SMS notification delivery. Receives your phone number and the body of each notification we send. We have explicitly pledged to Twilio and the underlying carriers that mobile information will not be shared with third parties for marketing or promotional purposes.
- Daily.co — video and audio call hosting for Scheduled Calls (pre-booked video consultations) and On-Call sessions (immediate-connect video sessions). Receives a unique room ID per session and produces a cloud recording of the call (see Section 5 below).
- UploadThing — secure file storage for credential documents, profile images, and vessel photos.
- Anthropic (Claude API) — automated reading of credential documents. When a Guide uploads a license, permit, insurance certificate, or photo ID, we use Anthropic's Claude API to read the document and pre-fill its details (credential number, holder name, expiry date) for the Guide to review and confirm. Documents are transmitted for one-time processing only and are not used to train AI models. We do not extract or store government ID numbers from photo IDs.
- Geocoding provider — geocoding addresses into latitude/longitude and reverse-geocoding map pins into place labels for the search experience.
- Vercel — application hosting and edge delivery.
- Supabase / PostgreSQL — primary database hosting.
4. SMS & Mobile Communications
Guidecall utilizes Twilio to transmit critical account alerts, secure messages, booking updates, trip reminders, and payout notifications via SMS.We do not sell, share, or distribute your mobile number to third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes.
Mobile information collected internally (your verified phone number and per-category opt-in selections) is used solely to deliver the platform notifications you explicitly requested via the checkboxes in your Account Settings. All SMS data handling complies with CTIA messaging principles and 10DLC carrier requirements. You may opt out at any time by replying STOP to any message we send or by toggling SMS off in your Dashboard Settings.
Deal Alerts (marketing messages). Separately, you may opt in to Guidecall Deal Alerts — recurring automated marketing texts and/or emails about discounted fishing-trip openings matching preferences you choose (location, species, timing, minimum discount, and maximum frequency) — on our public signup page at /deal-alerts. Customers with an account may additionally receive last-minute opening texts from captains they have fished with or favorited when the “Deals” SMS notification category is enabled in Account Settings. These are the only marketing SMS we send; each requires its own opt-in, and consent is not a condition of any purchase. Marketing texts go only to US mobile numbers, and only during the texting hours permitted by the recipient’s state law. Deal-alert phone numbers are verified with a one-time code before any alert is sent. The mobile number and preferences you provide are used solely by Guidecall to send these alerts and are never sold or shared with third parties for their marketing. Reply STOP to any alert to opt out of texts, use the manage link in every message to change preferences or unsubscribe, and reply HELP for assistance. Message and data rates may apply; message frequency is limited to the cap you select.
5. Video Calls & Cloud Recording
Scheduled Calls and On-Call sessions take place inside private 2-participant video rooms hosted by Daily.co. All call sessions are recorded to the cloud. Recordings are retained for dispute resolution, refund review, and platform integrity. Recordings are visible only to Guidecall admins for review purposes and to the call participants themselves on request. By joining a call, both parties consent to being recorded.
6. Public Profile, Listings & Reviews
Certain information you provide is intentionally public so the marketplace can function:
- Guide profiles (business name, captain name, bio, profile picture, target species, fishing techniques, vessel photos and details, pricing, availability, meetup region) are public.
- Trip listings (title, description, price, duration, days of week, season, target species, photos) are public.
- Customer reviews are public on the reviewed Guide's profile. By default a review includes your first name and profile image. You may submit a review anonymously at the time of writing it — anonymous reviews omit your name and image.
- Per-product approval status (whether a Guide is approved for In-Person Trips, Scheduled Calls, or On-Call) determines which sections of a profile are publicly visible.
7. Cookies & Session Tracking
We use session cookies via our authentication provider (Clerk) to keep you signed in. We use lightweight first-party local-storage flags to remember UI preferences (calendar view, recent searches, autoscroll position). We also set one first-party analytics cookie (gc_aid, retained for one year) that assigns your browser a random identifier so we can understand how the site is used (pages viewed, searches, bookings started). This data is used only by Guidecall for product analytics, is never sold or shared with third parties, and is not used for advertising. We do not use third-party advertising cookies. We do not currently use cross-site tracking pixels. We do not currently respond to "Do Not Track" browser signals because no uniform industry standard for DNT has been adopted.
8. How We Use Your Personal Data
We will only use your personal data when the law allows us to. The legal bases we rely on include: performing our contract with you, pursuing our legitimate business interests (provided your rights do not override those interests), complying with legal obligations, and, where applicable, your consent. Most commonly, we use your personal data to:
- Perform the contract connecting Guides and Clients (matching, booking, communication).
- Process customer payments and deliver Guide payouts.
- Send transactional notifications (email and SMS based on your opt-in preferences).
- Verify Guide credentials and maintain compliance with marine, fishing, and federal licensing requirements.
- Investigate and resolve refund disputes, payout reversals, and customer-safety reports.
- Manage our relationship with you and provide customer support.
- Detect, prevent, and address fraud, abuse, and security incidents.
9. Data Security
We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal data from being accidentally lost, used, or accessed in an unauthorized way. However, no method of transmission over the Internet or method of electronic storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. We limit access to your personal data to those employees, agents, contractors, and processors who have a strict business need to know. Credential documents are stored in segregated, access-controlled buckets and are visible only to Guidecall admins. When automated document reading is used, the file is transmitted securely to our AI processor for a single read and is not retained by that processor or used for model training.
10. Data Retention
We retain personal data only as long as necessary to provide the service and to satisfy our legal, tax, accounting, and dispute-resolution obligations. Specifically:
- Account data is retained for the lifetime of your account. Upon account deletion (see Section 12), we anonymize your name, email, and phone within thirty (30) days.
- Transaction and payout records are retained for at least seven (7) years to comply with IRS retention rules, the card networks' and our payment processor's dispute and chargeback windows, and applicable state tax law. Personally identifying fields on those records are anonymized following account deletion; the underlying financial record remains.
- Call recordings are retained for approximately one hundred twenty (120) days after the session ends, longer if a refund ticket or dispute is opened.
- Credential documents are retained for as long as the Guide's account is active. Expired credentials are retained for an additional one (1) year after expiry for audit purposes.
- SMS opt-in / opt-out logs are retained for at least seven (7) years following the user's last account activity, or longer where required for carrier-compliance and audit purposes.
- Trip participant records: if a listed participant never signs the waiver, their information is automatically deleted ninety (90) days after the trip ends. Signed waivers are legal records and are retained for as long as a claim relating to the trip could be brought (including extended periods where a participant was a minor); a signed participant's contact details (email/phone) can be removed on request while the signed waiver itself is preserved.
11. Your Rights
Depending on your jurisdiction, you may have the following rights. We may need to verify your identity before fulfilling any request to protect the security of your personal data:
- Right of Access — request a copy of the personal data we hold about you. We will respond to verified requests within forty-five (45) days.
- Right of Correction — ask us to correct inaccurate or incomplete data. You can update most fields yourself from Account Settings.
- Right of Deletion — request deletion of your personal data (subject to legal retention obligations described in Section 10). Logged-in users can self-initiate from Account Settings; guests can use guidecall.app/privacy/delete. Where full deletion is not possible due to legal or compliance requirements, we will anonymize the relevant data.
- Right to Withdraw Consent — for SMS, reply STOP or untoggle SMS categories in Account Settings. For email, use the unsubscribe link or toggle email categories in Account Settings.
- Right to Lodge a Complaint — you may complain to your local data-protection authority.
12. Account Deletion
Logged-in users may request deletion from Account Settings. Guests and former users may use guidecall.app/privacy/delete. We will anonymize your name, email, and phone within thirty (30) days of confirmation. Past booking, payment, and refund records remain in our systems in anonymized form to satisfy our obligations under federal, state, tax, and payment-network rules (including IRS retention and payment-network dispute-history requirements).
Trip participants without an account: if you were listed as a participant on someone else's booking and never created a Guidecall account, you can still exercise your privacy rights — email privacy@guidecall.app or use guidecall.app/privacy/request. If you never signed a waiver, your information is deleted automatically ninety (90) days after the trip (or sooner on request). If you signed a waiver, we can remove your contact details on request, but the signed waiver itself is a legal record we must retain as described in Section 10.
13. Children's Privacy
Guidecall is intended for users 18 years of age or older. We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 18, and our services are not directed to children under 13 within the meaning of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). If you believe a minor has provided us with personal information, please contact us at the email below and we will promptly delete it.