Privacy

Scam Guardian helps you check a suspicious call with your family. It keeps as little as it can, for as short a time as it can.

What we never do

• We never record your phone calls. We only work with what you tell us.
• We never ask for card, bank or Social Security numbers. If you start saying one, we stop you and remove it before anything is saved.
• We never call, text or email the person who contacted you.
• We never file a report for you. You or your family send it.
• We never sell or share your information.

What we keep and why

The family page

• The email of the family member who set it up, so they can sign in.
• The first name we use to greet the person we protect.
• For each person your family saves: name, relationship, nicknames, and a phone number or email, so we can check with them when you ask.
• The family password, if you set one. We store it scrambled. Nobody can read it back, not even us. We can only tell whether a word matches it.

Each check

• What you told us about the call, with card, bank and Social Security numbers removed. The phone number the caller used is kept for the report summary, and we never call it.
• The warning signs we found, the messages we sent with your yes, and the replies.
• The report summary, if you asked for one.

How long we keep it

• Checks and report summaries: 30 days, then they are deleted.
• Sign in links: 15 minutes, and each works only once.
• Demo households, the demo phone and the simulated Echo conversation: 24 hours.
• Your family page: until your family deletes it.
• Server logs: one week. They hold only ids, timings and error codes, never what you said.
• To stop one visitor from starting hundreds of demos, we keep a scrambled version of your internet address for one hour. We cannot turn it back into the address.

Where it runs

Scam Guardian runs on Amazon Web Services in the United States. Your information is kept in Amazon DynamoDB, emails go through Amazon SES, and Amazon Polly reads Alexa's answers aloud.

To understand what you said, the text of what you told us, with card, bank and Social Security numbers already removed, is sent to a language model on Amazon Bedrock. Amazon runs the model itself: the company that made the model does not see what is sent to it. If that service is slow or unavailable, Scam Guardian answers with its own fixed sentences instead.

Speaking instead of typing

When you talk to the demo, your browser turns your voice into text. Some browsers send that audio to the company that makes the browser to do this. If you prefer, type instead. Typing works everywhere on this site.

Who receives messages

Only the people your family saved, and only after you say yes. Every message has a link to stop all messages from us.

Delete everything

On the family page, choose Delete all household data. Every person, password and check is erased right away.

Questions

Open an issue on our GitHub page.