Privacy Policy

This policy explains how we handle information across everything we run: this website, the client portal, the AI receptionist that answers our clients' phones, the websites and phone lines we build and operate, and our lead-generation sites. Plain language, no hedging — if something here is unclear, email us and we will fix the wording.

1. Who we are and what this covers

Ctrl Shift Esc, LLC ("CSE," "we," "us," "our") is a Missouri limited liability company. We build and host websites, operate an AI phone receptionist ("ACE"), run a client portal and customer-communication platform for local businesses, and build and rent local lead-generation websites.

This policy covers:

• this website, controlshiftescapeit.com;
• the client portal and mobile app at crm.controlshiftescapeit.com;
• the phone lines, messaging, booking, and websites we operate for our clients; and
• the lead-generation websites we own.

It does not cover what any of our clients or any other business does with information after they receive it. Those businesses have their own policies and their own responsibilities.

2. The two roles we play

This distinction matters, so it goes near the top.

Where we decide. For our own website visitors, our own prospects, our own client accounts, and the lead-generation sites we own, we decide what information is collected and why. In privacy law terms we are the controller, and this policy describes what we do.

Where our client decides. When a business hires us, they load their own customers' and prospects' information into the platform — contacts, phone numbers, email addresses, notes, appointments — and their callers reach a line we operate on their behalf. For that information, our client is the controller and we act as their processor: we handle it on their instructions, to run the service they bought, and we do not use it for our own purposes. If you are that client's customer and want your information corrected or deleted, the fastest route is to contact that business directly. See Section 17.

3. What we collect

Account and business information. When a business becomes a client, we collect the business name, contact names, email addresses, phone numbers, mailing or service address, business details used to configure the service (hours, services offered, service area, pricing rules, scripts), and the names and logins of the people authorized to use the portal.

Customer and contact information our clients load. Client accounts contain contact records for that client's own customers and prospects — typically name, phone number, email address, address, tags, notes, appointment history, quote and invoice history, and message history. Our clients decide what goes in.

Calls, recordings, and transcripts. Where a plan includes phone answering, calls to the service line are recorded and transcribed. We collect the audio recording, the transcript, the caller's phone number, the time and length of the call, and the details the caller gives — typically name, callback number, address, the reason for the call, and urgency. Call detail records from the telephone provider are also collected. Voicemail audio and its transcript are handled the same way.

Messages and conversations. Text messages, web-chat conversations, form submissions, and emails sent or received through the platform, including their content, timestamps, delivery status, and opt-out status.

Booking and calendar information. Appointments, availability, reminders, confirmations, and related notes.

Billing information. Plan, invoices, payment status, and the last four digits and card type of a payment method. Full card numbers and bank account numbers are entered directly with our payment processor and are not stored by us.

Website and technical information. Our hosting and network providers log basic technical data automatically — IP address, browser and device type, referring page, pages requested, and timestamps — to keep sites fast, available, and secure. The portal also records usage events such as sign-ins, feature use, and errors.

Cookies. See Section 12.

We do not ask for and do not want Social Security numbers, government identification numbers, financial account numbers, health records, or other sensitive categories, and our terms tell clients not to store them in the portal.

4. Where it comes from

• Directly from you — a form, a phone call, an email, a signup, a portal entry.
• From our clients, when they import or enter their own contact records.
• Automatically, from your device and our providers' logs when you use a site or the portal.
• From the providers that carry the call or the message — for example the telephone carrier that supplies caller ID or a delivery receipt.

5. Why we use it

• To answer calls, capture leads, and deliver those leads to the business that should receive them.
• To send, receive, and route messages, replies, reminders, confirmations, and review requests that a client has configured.
• To operate the portal, book appointments, and keep records accurate.
• To respond to your inquiry and provide the service you asked about.
• To bill, collect payment, and keep tax and accounting records.
• To provide support, troubleshoot, and investigate problems.
• To keep our systems secure — detecting fraud, abuse, spam, and unauthorized access.
• To improve quality — reviewing how calls and automations performed and tuning scripts and flows.
• To meet legal, regulatory, and record-keeping obligations, and to establish or defend legal claims.

We do not use client-loaded contact data to market our own services to those contacts.

6. Call recording and transcription

Calls answered by ACE on a client's service line are recorded and transcribed. That is how the lead gets captured accurately and handed to the business, and how call quality gets reviewed.

Callers are told. Answered calls include a spoken notice that the call is recorded and that the caller is speaking with an automated assistant. Missouri, where we operate, requires the consent of only one party to a call — we disclose recording anyway, and we do it at the start.

The recording belongs to the business. Recordings and transcripts of a client's calls are that client's data. People the client authorizes in the portal can listen to and read them.

Consent duties sit with the business. Recording laws differ by state and a caller may be anywhere, including in a state that requires every party to consent. Under our terms, each client is responsible for meeting any notice or consent obligation it owes its own callers. We provide the spoken notice to help, not to take that responsibility on.

If you called a business and want the recording of your call deleted, contact that business; they control it. You can also contact us and we will route the request.

7. AI and your information

Our receptionist and assistant features send call audio, transcripts, and message text to AI providers so the system can understand a caller, speak a reply, write a summary, and draft a message. Those providers process that content under contract, to deliver the service to us, and are not free to use it for their own purposes.

We do not train AI models on our clients' customer data. We do not build or train our own models on call content, transcripts, or client-loaded contact records, and we do not sell or hand that content to anyone to train theirs. Where a provider offers a setting that keeps customer content out of model training, our practice is to use it.

What we do use for improvement is aggregated and de-identified information — counts, timings, patterns, and error rates that do not identify a business or a person — to tune scripts and flows and to make the service work better.

AI output can be wrong. Summaries, transcripts, and drafted replies are reviewed by the business that receives them before they act, and our terms require that. Nothing produced by the AI is professional advice, and the service is not an emergency service.

8. Texts and emails

Outbound text messaging runs through carrier-registered business messaging (A2P 10DLC). Message and data rates may apply. Reply STOP to any message to opt out, and HELP for help — opt-outs are honored and suppressed going forward.

Under our terms, the business that owns the account is responsible for having the consent required by law for the numbers and email addresses it loads and messages, including under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and the CAN-SPAM Act. If you received a message you did not consent to, tell us and we will investigate and suppress the number.

We use email to send service and account notices, invoices, and — if you asked for them — updates about what we do. Marketing emails from us carry an unsubscribe link. Service and billing notices are not marketing and continue while your account is open.

9. Lead-generation sites

Some of the websites we operate are lead-generation sites we own. When you contact one of those sites, your request — the call summary or the form details — is forwarded to one local business that performs that service in that area, so they can contact you and do the work. From that point that business is responsible for its own handling of your information. We forward leads only to the servicing business. We do not sell your information, and we do not distribute one request to a list of competing buyers.

10. Who we share it with

We share information with the following categories of recipients, and no others without telling you:

The business the request is for. The client whose line or site you contacted, or the servicing business described in Section 9.

Service providers who run parts of our platform on our behalf. They may use the information only to provide their service to us, under contract. As of the date above they are, by function:

• Customer-communication and CRM platform — the licensed platform behind the client portal, unified inbox, calendar, automations, and contact records.
• Telephony and messaging — the carrier and messaging provider that carries phone calls and text messages and produces call records.
• AI voice and language processing — the providers that generate the receptionist's speech and process call audio and text to produce transcripts, summaries, and drafted replies.
• Payments — the processor that handles card and bank payments and stores payment credentials (currently Stripe, Inc.).
• Email delivery — the providers that send and receive transactional and campaign email on our behalf.
• Hosting, network, and security — the providers that serve our websites and the sites we operate, and that supply encryption, firewalling, and denial-of-service protection (currently Cloudflare, Inc.).

This list can change as we change providers. We will keep it current here.

Professional advisors — accountants, lawyers, and insurers, where they need it and under a duty of confidence.

Legal and safety — where a valid legal request, subpoena, or law requires it, or where we reasonably need to protect the rights, property, or safety of CSE, our clients, or the public.

Business transfer — if the business is sold, merged, or reorganized, information may transfer as part of that transaction. We will tell you if that materially changes how your information is handled.

11. We do not sell your information

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. We do not run advertising trackers or third-party ad pixels on this site. We have not sold or shared personal information for those purposes in the preceding twelve months.

12. Cookies, tracking, and other sites

Our websites use a small number of cookies and similar technologies that are necessary to make pages work, keep a session signed in, remember a preference, and protect against abuse. The client portal uses cookies to keep you signed in.

We do not use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies on controlshiftescapeit.com. Where we look at aggregate traffic, we use privacy-respecting measurements from our hosting provider rather than a personal-profile advertising network. Third-party platforms we use, including the client portal, may set their own cookies necessary to their operation.

You can block or delete cookies in your browser, though parts of the portal will stop working if you block the ones it needs. Because we do not sell or share personal information for advertising, there is nothing for a Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal to switch off — but we honor those signals where the law requires it.

Our sites and the portal may link to sites we do not run. Their privacy practices are their own, and this policy does not cover them.

13. How long we keep it, and export

While an account is active, we keep client account data, contacts, conversations, call recordings, and transcripts for as long as the service runs, because that is the record the business works from. Clients can export their data from the portal at any time.

After a client's service ends, we make a reasonable export of contacts, leads, and call recordings and transcripts available for thirty (30) days. After that window, data may be deleted from active systems in the ordinary course. Request an export at levi@controlshiftescapeit.com.

Leads from our own lead-generation sites are kept while they are useful for follow-up and dispute resolution, then deleted or anonymized on a rolling basis.

Everything else — technical logs, billing and tax records, and records we are legally required to hold — is kept for the period the purpose or the law requires, then deleted.

Copies can persist for a period in routine backups after deletion from active systems, and we may retain what we need to resolve a dispute, enforce our agreements, or comply with law.

14. How we protect it

Stated plainly, without overpromising:

• Our sites and the portal are served over encrypted connections (HTTPS), behind a network with a web application firewall and denial-of-service protection.
• Portal access requires a named login, and access within a client's account is limited to the people that client authorizes.
• Access on our side is limited to the people who need it to run and support the service.
• Payment credentials are held by our payment processor, not by us.
• We rely on established providers for the platform, telephony, and hosting layers, and we use their security controls as they are offered.

We do not hold a formal security certification, and we will not claim one. No system is perfectly secure and no one can promise otherwise. If we become aware of a breach affecting personal information we hold, we will notify affected clients and individuals as required by law, and we will tell our clients what we know without waiting to be asked.

15. Your choices and rights

You can ask us to:

• tell you what personal information we hold about you and how we use it;
• give you a copy of it;
• correct it if it is wrong;
• delete it, where we are not required to keep it;
• stop sending you marketing; or
• stop forwarding your request as a lead, where we still can.

Email levi@controlshiftescapeit.com or use our contact form. We will respond within a reasonable time and within any period the law sets. We may need to verify who you are before acting, and we will not treat you differently for making a request.

If the information is held in a client's account rather than ours — for example because you are a customer of a business we serve — we will pass your request to that business and help them act on it. See Section 17.

16. State privacy rights

Residents of states with comprehensive privacy laws — including California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Utah, Texas, Oregon, Montana, and others as those laws take effect — have rights to know, access, correct, delete, obtain a portable copy, and opt out of sale, targeted advertising, and certain profiling. As stated in Section 11, we do not sell personal information or use it for targeted advertising, and we do not use it for profiling that produces legal or similarly significant effects.

To exercise a right, use the contact details in Section 21. An authorized agent may submit a request on your behalf with proof of authorization. If we deny a request, you may appeal by replying to our response with the word "appeal"; we will review and respond within the period the law allows, and if we deny the appeal we will tell you how to complain to your state attorney general.

California residents may also ask for the categories of personal information collected, the sources, the business purpose, and the categories of recipients — all of which are described in Sections 3, 4, 5, and 10.

17. If you're a customer of one of our clients

If you called, texted, booked with, or filled out a form for a local business that uses our platform, the record of that interaction sits in that business's account. They decide what to keep and how to use it, and we handle it under their instructions.

Contact that business first — they can act immediately. If you would rather come to us, email levi@controlshiftescapeit.com and we will forward your request to them and support them in honoring it, as our contracts require.

18. Children

Our sites, the portal, and our services are for businesses and adults. They are not directed to children, we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13, and we do not knowingly sell or share the personal information of anyone under 16. If you believe a child's information reached us, email us and we will delete it.

19. Where information is processed

We operate in the United States and our providers store and process information in the United States. If you contact us from outside the U.S., you understand your information will be handled here, under U.S. law. We do not currently market our services outside the United States.

20. Changes to this policy

We update this policy when what we do changes. The current version always lives at this address with the "Last updated" date at the top. For a material change we will make reasonable efforts to notify clients in the portal or by email before it takes effect.

21. Contact

Ctrl Shift Esc, LLC · Missouri, USA
levi@controlshiftescapeit.com · Contact form · Client Portal Terms of Use

Questions, corrections, and complaints all go to the same place, and a person reads them.