Terms of use

Before You Pick Up lets people look up a phone number and see reports other people made about it, and add their own. Reports are anonymous, unverified, and describe behavior tied to a number. We host them; we don't write them and we don't confirm them.

Before You Pick Up is not a consumer reporting agency, and nothing on it is a consumer report under the Fair Credit Reporting Act or any similar law. It is not a background check, a people search, or an identity verification service. You may not use Before You Pick Up, in whole or in part, to decide whether someone is eligible for employment, housing or tenancy, credit, insurance, or for any other purpose that law covers. By using the site you confirm that you won't.

• You must be 18 or older.
• You may not use the site where doing so is against the law.
• If you make an account, keep your password to yourself. What happens under your account is your responsibility until you tell us it's been compromised.

When you send a report, you're telling us and everyone who reads it that:

• It's your own experience. You received the call or text, or you dealt with the person, yourself.
• It's true as far as you know, and not exaggerated to make a point.
• It describes what someone did or said, not who they are. No names, handles, emails, addresses, workplaces, schools, photos, or other phone numbers in the note. Describing someone closely enough to identify them counts too.
• It isn't a duplicate, a retaliation, or a favor for someone else.

You keep whatever rights you have in what you write. You give us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to store, show, aggregate, redact, and adapt it, and to let search engines index it, for as long as it's live and afterward as a moderation record. That license is what lets us run the site. If you remove your report, it comes off the site; we keep the record that it existed.

• Harass, stalk, threaten, or intimidate anyone, or use the site to find, contact, or target the person behind a number.
• File false, misleading, retaliatory, or duplicate reports, or report from several accounts or connections to inflate a number.
• Scrape, crawl, or bulk-download the site, or resell or republish its data.
• Get around rate limits, holds, takedowns, or bans.
• Impersonate us, a moderator, or anyone else, or present a report as verified when it isn't.
• Interfere with the site or try to get at data you're not meant to see.

Breaking these can get a report removed and an account or connection restricted, without notice.

We can remove, redact, hold, label, or decline any report, and take down any number's page, at our discretion and with or without notice, when we think it breaks these terms, the community guidelines, or the law, or when we think that's the right call for the person the number belongs to. We don't undertake to review everything, and a report being live doesn't mean we checked it.

Some checks are automatic: notes with identifying details are refused, bursts of reports on one number are held for a look, and rate limits apply. People review flags, held reports, and disputes. If you have an account and we remove your report, its status shows under Account. If you think we got it wrong, email hello@beforeyoupickup.com.

If a number that's yours, or that belongs to someone you know, is listed and you think that's wrong, send a dispute. It's free and doesn't need an account. While we look, we may mark the reports disputed. Then a person decides whether to keep them, remove some or all, or take the page down, and tells you which. We aim to answer within a few business days, but we can't promise a particular outcome or timeline.

We won't tell you who reported a number, and we won't hand that information to anyone except in response to valid legal process. We never charge for review or removal, and nobody offering to get you delisted for a fee is working with us.

• Something abusive or urgent on the site: email abuse@beforeyoupickup.com with a link to the report. Threats, harassment, and anything identifying a person come down fast.
• Intimate images: we don't host images or media. If a report describes or links to an intimate depiction of you, email abuse@beforeyoupickup.com and we'll remove it promptly, within 48 hours at most.
• Copyright: if you believe text on the site infringes your rights, email abuse@beforeyoupickup.com with the link, what you own, and how to reach you. We remove infringing content and restrict repeat infringers.
• Legal process: serve it to abuse@beforeyoupickup.com. We respond to valid process, and we push back on requests that are broader than they need to be.

The site is provided as is. Reports are unverified and can be wrong, out of date, about a spoofed or reassigned number, or malicious. We don't guarantee that anything on the site is accurate, that a number with no reports is safe, or that the site will always be available. Decisions you make based on what you read here are yours.

To the extent the law allows, we aren't liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost money, data, or opportunities, arising from your use of the site or from any report on it. Our total liability to you for anything connected to the site is capped at one hundred US dollars. Some places don't allow some of these limits, in which case they apply as far as they can.

If someone brings a claim against us because of a report you made or something you did on the site, you agree to cover our reasonable costs of dealing with it.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Florida and applicable United States federal law, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. Any dispute that can't be settled by email goes to the state or federal courts located in Florida, and you agree to their jurisdiction. If you have a problem with us, email first; most things get sorted that way. If any part of these terms can't be enforced, the rest still applies.

The effective date at the top tells you when these were last changed. If we change something that matters, we'll say so on the site before it takes effect. Using the site after that means you accept the new version.

General: hello@beforeyoupickup.com. Abuse and legal: abuse@beforeyoupickup.com. Your data: privacy@beforeyoupickup.com. See also the privacy policy and the community guidelines.