How Google Voice protects your privacy and keeps you in control

Keeping you safe online means protecting your information and respecting your privacy. That’s why, in every product we make, we focus on keeping your information secure, treating it responsibly and keeping you in control. Our teams work every day to make Google products safe, no matter what you’re doing – browsing the web, managing your inbox or getting directions.

Your information is protected by world-class security. You can always control your privacy settings in your Google Account.

For general information about privacy on Google Voice, keep reading this article.
For more about privacy tools, visit the Google Safety Centre.
For details about privacy in work and school accounts, use the Google Workspace security resources.

A more helpful and personalised experience for you

When you use Google Voice, we process some information to offer you better experiences in the product. Your information stays secure. You can always control your privacy settings in your Google Account.

Your content is stored securely

When you send and receive text messages and attachments on Google Voice, they’re stored securely in our world-class data centres. Data is encrypted in transit from a Google Voice client to Google, and when stored at rest.

When you record a voicemail greeting on Google Voice, or when you leave a voicemail for others, your audio data is stored.

Texts, calls and voicemails are synced across your devices. You can delete text messages, calls or voicemails.

Your Google Account comes with built-in security designed to detect and block threats like as spam, phishing and malware. Your activity is stored using strong industry standards and practices.

Your contact info helps to sync your data and keep you updated

To help you sign up, show a personalised list of contacts and inform you of service changes, we save your name and email address. To sync your preferences and keep survey and analytics data separate from your other accounts, we use your email address.

If you have a work or school account, your organisation’s administrator keeps a physical address for each phone number in case emergency calls are placed.

To help you identify calls, texts, messages and voicemails, we use your contacts stored on your device and in your Google Account.

Your phone number enables Google Voice features

You can send calls from your personal phone number to your Google Voice phone number with Google Voice call forwarding. You can change where you get calls, including which numbers and devices are linked. You can port or transfer your personal phone number to Google Voice.

Your Google Voice phone number helps you to make and receive calls and send and receive text messages. You can hide your caller ID when you make calls on Google Voice. You can also change the caller ID for incoming calls.

If you ever lose access to Google Voice, your phone number helps with account recovery.

Security and safety

If you have a work or school account, you can get help in an emergency by calling your local emergency services number from Google Voice. If you call an emergency number while in your home country, Google Voice will send your personal address to the emergency services.

Google Voice uses data to improve your experience

To provide services like spam filtering, we process your content.

To improve Google Voice’s performance and reliability, and to help with troubleshooting in case of issues while you use Google Voice, we collect performance data and crash analytics. We also save this info to help prevent and analyse abuse of our services.

Google Voice doesn’t use your content for advertising

We don’t use information in apps where you primarily store personal content – including Google Voice – for advertising purposes, ever.

Stay in control of your content with easy-to-use settings

You decide what content is shared and with whom

The content that you save on Google is private unless you choose to share it with others.

Google respects your privacy. We access your private content only when we have your permission or are required to by law. With the Google Transparency Report, we share data about how the policies and actions of governments and corporations affect privacy, security and access to information.

It’s easy to view and control your data

With the Google Account dashboard, you can see an overview of the Google products that you use and the things that you store, like your emails and photos. Learn how to view and control activity in your Google Account.

Sync your services with your location

To understand how your experience of the product may relate to geography, like when you send feedback to Google, and to keep your account secure, like if we notice that you have signed in from a new location, we save some coarse location info.

Location helps you to understand where Google Voice is available. Your location also helps Google Voice to display the best language in-product. If you have a work or school account, your physical address is used if an emergency call is placed.

You can take your data with you

Everyone should have access to the content that they’ve shared with us, at any time and for any reason. That’s why we created Download Your Data, so you can download your photos, emails, contacts and bookmarks. It’s your choice to make a copy of your data, back it up or even move it to another service. Export your data from Google Voice.

You are always in control of the data saved to your Google Account. Learn how to download your data .

If you have a work or school account, your organisation can choose to download your data and to limit you from downloading it. Learn how an organisation can export its data.