We appreciate the questions about how and why we track communications between you and your customers. We care deeply about your privacy and recognize that we may not have been as clear as we could have been in explaining why our Terms of Use say what they do.
To start, it’s important to remember how you pay Thumbtack for leads. You don’t pay us until a customer contacts you--for instance, when a customer messages you on Thumbtack, sends you a text, or calls you. In order to accurately charge you for those leads, we therefore have to know when a customer contacts you. So here’s how that works across different kinds of communication methods:
- Contacts on Thumbtack: If a customer contacts you through our own platform, that’s easy--we know that occurs.
- Phone calls: We know you want customers to be able to call you, and we do too. So we use a company called Twilio--which is used by organizations ranging from Airbnb to the Red Cross--to mask the phone number you enter on your profile, track the occurrence of the call, and forward the call to your number. We do not listen to or record those phone calls, and we would never do so unless you gave us explicit permission for a specific circumstance. Our terms of use do not give us that permission.
- Text Messages: We are considering functionality where a customer could text you through the masked phone number on your profile, and we would, deliver the message to you through Thumbtack. We therefore would know the contact occurred and have its contents on our platform. If, however, a customer later gets your actual phone number and texts it, we won’t know anything about it.
Please keep your questions coming. We care about your privacy and do not want to misuse the trust you put in us.
