Summary for convenience
Plain EnglishHow we handle your personal data, in short:
- What we collect: account and contact details, device data, professional information (like resumes and job descriptions), and — when you use Sidekick — interview transcripts and AI-generated summaries. Interview audio is transcribed in real time and deleted when the interview ends; we never keep recordings.
- How we use it: to provide and improve the Services, communicate with you, and meet security and legal obligations.
- Who sees it: service providers that help us run Messa, and — for some website data — advertising partners. If you're a candidate, your prospective employer controls your interview data; we process it on their behalf.
- Your choices: you can manage cookies, and depending on where you live you can ask to access, correct, or delete your data — just email privacy@messa.ai.
At Messa Inc. (“Messa”) we take your privacy seriously. Please read this Privacy Policy to learn how we treat your personal data. By using or accessing our website at www.messa.ai or our products and services (collectively, the “Services”) in any manner, you acknowledge that you accept the practices and policies outlined below, and you hereby understand that we will collect, use and disclose your information as described in this Privacy Policy.
Remember that your use of Messa's Services is at all times subject to our Terms of Use, which incorporates this Privacy Policy. Any terms we use in this Policy without defining them have the definitions given to them in the Terms of Use.
You may print a copy of this Privacy Policy by clicking .
As we continually work to improve our Services, we may need to change this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will alert you of material changes by placing a notice on the Messa website, by sending you an email and/or by some other means. Please note that if you've opted not to receive legal notice emails from us (or you haven't provided us with your email address), those legal notices will still govern your use of the Services, and you are still responsible for reading and understanding them. If you use the Services after any changes to the Privacy Policy have been posted, that means you agree to all of the changes.
1. What this Privacy Policy Covers
This Privacy Policy covers how we treat Personal Data that we gather when you access or use our Services. “Personal Data” means any information that identifies or relates to a particular individual and also includes information referred to as “personally identifiable information” or “personal information” or “sensitive personal information” under applicable data privacy laws, rules or regulations. This Privacy Policy does not cover the practices of companies we don't own or control or people we don't manage.
If you are a candidate and your prospective employer uses our Services to process your application and assist with the interview, we are a processor of your Personal Data. We are happy to answer general questions about our processing of your Personal Data, but to exercise any rights with respect to your Personal Data that we process on behalf of your prospective employer, please reach out to such employer who will remain the controller.
Messa is based in the United States and your Personal Data will be processed and stored in the U.S. and other countries as needed, in each case with appropriate safeguards.
2. Personal Data
Categories of Personal Data We Collect
This chart details the categories of Personal Data that we collect and have collected over the past 12 months:
| Category of Personal Data (and Examples) | Categories of Third Parties With Whom We Disclose this Personal Data |
|---|---|
| Account and Contact Data such as first and last name, email, username, phone number, and unique identifiers. |
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| Device and Technical Data such as web page interactions and referring webpage/source through which you accessed the Services, IP address, browser type, operating system, device identifiers, request IDs, and statistics associated with the interaction between device or browser and the Services, which may be collected through cookies and similar technologies that use identifiers. |
|
| Professional or Employment-Related Data such as job title and company name, resumes, job descriptions, scorecards, ATS information (if integrated), or other files you choose to share. |
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| Geolocation Data such as IP address-based location information. |
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| Other Identifying Information that You Voluntarily Choose to Provide such as emails, letters, texts, or other communications you send us. |
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| Information from Integrations. If you connect the Services to third-party services (e.g., ATS, conferencing tools), we may collect information from those services in accordance with your permissions and their terms. |
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| Interview Data Collected by Sidekick. When you use Messa Sidekick during an interview, we collect transcripts and other summaries of audio/video events during the interview. We also collect metadata such as date, time, participants, and duration of interviews. We collect and process AI-generated summaries, skill assessments, and evaluation data based on the interview conversation. Specifically, the interview audio is captured by our service provider Recall.ai, which processes it into a real-time transcript and deletes the audio when the interview ends. Messa does not retain any audio recordings. |
|
Account and Contact Data such as first and last name, email, username, phone number, and unique identifiers.
Disclosed to
- Service Providers
- Advertising Partners
Device and Technical Data such as web page interactions and referring webpage/source through which you accessed the Services, IP address, browser type, operating system, device identifiers, request IDs, and statistics associated with the interaction between device or browser and the Services, which may be collected through cookies and similar technologies that use identifiers.
Disclosed to
- Service Providers
- Advertising Partners
Professional or Employment-Related Data such as job title and company name, resumes, job descriptions, scorecards, ATS information (if integrated), or other files you choose to share.
Disclosed to
- Service Providers
- Advertising Partners
Geolocation Data such as IP address-based location information.
Disclosed to
- Service Providers
- Advertising Partners
Other Identifying Information that You Voluntarily Choose to Provide such as emails, letters, texts, or other communications you send us.
Disclosed to
- Service Providers
- Advertising Partners
Information from Integrations. If you connect the Services to third-party services (e.g., ATS, conferencing tools), we may collect information from those services in accordance with your permissions and their terms.
Disclosed to
- Service Providers
Interview Data Collected by Sidekick. When you use Messa Sidekick during an interview, we collect transcripts and other summaries of audio/video events during the interview. We also collect metadata such as date, time, participants, and duration of interviews. We collect and process AI-generated summaries, skill assessments, and evaluation data based on the interview conversation. Specifically, the interview audio is captured by our service provider Recall.ai, which processes it into a real-time transcript and deletes the audio when the interview ends. Messa does not retain any audio recordings.
Disclosed to
- Service Providers
Our Commercial or Business Purposes for Collecting Personal Data
Providing, Customizing and Improving the Services, including Messa Sidekick
- Creating and managing your account or other user profiles.
- Processing orders or other transactions; billing.
- Providing you with the products, services or information you request.
- Meeting or fulfilling the reason you provided the information to us.
- Providing support and assistance for the Services.
- Improving the Services, including testing, research, internal analytics and product development.
- Understanding and analyzing your interactions with our website.
- Personalizing the Services, website content and communications based on your preferences.
- Generating AI-assisted insights and recommendations.
- Processing and analyzing interview transcripts, notes, and related content.
- Detecting, preventing, and addressing technical issues, fraud, or misuse.
Corresponding with You
- Responding to correspondence that we receive from you, contacting you when necessary or requested, and sending you information about the Company or the Services.
- Sending emails and other communications according to your preferences.
Other Permitted Purposes for Processing Personal Data
In addition, each of the above referenced categories of Personal Data may be collected, used, and disclosed with the government, including law enforcement, or other parties to meet certain legal requirements and enforcing legal terms including: fulfilling our legal obligations under applicable law, regulation, court order or other legal process, such as preventing, detecting and investigating security incidents and potentially illegal or prohibited activities; protecting the rights, property or safety of you, Messa or another party; enforcing any agreements with you; responding to claims that any posting or other content violates third-party rights; and resolving disputes.
We will not collect additional categories of Personal Data or use the Personal Data we collected for materially different, unrelated or incompatible purposes without providing you notice or obtaining your consent.
Categories of Sources of Personal Data
We collect Personal Data about you from the following categories of sources:
You
- When you provide such information directly to us.
- When you create an account or use our interactive tools and Services.
- When you voluntarily provide information in free-form text boxes through the Services or through responses to surveys or questionnaires.
- When you send us an email or otherwise contact us.
- When you use the Services and such information is collected automatically:
- Through Cookies (defined in the “Tracking Tools, Advertising and Opt-Out” section below).
- If you use a location-enabled browser, we may receive information about your location and mobile device, as applicable.
- If you download and install certain applications and software we make available, we may receive and collect information transmitted from your computing device for the purpose of providing you the relevant Services, such as information regarding when you are logged on and available to receive updates or alert notices.
Our Customers, Third Parties and Public Records
- If you are a candidate, we receive Personal Data about you from our customer (with whom you are interviewing) and from third party data providers we contract with.
- From public social media posts or other sources.
3. How We Disclose Your Personal Data
We disclose your Personal Data to the categories of service providers and other parties listed in this section. Depending on state laws that may be applicable to you, some of these disclosures may constitute a “sale” of your Personal Data. For more information, please refer to the state-specific sections below. Also, if you are a candidate and we process your Personal Data on behalf of your prospective employer, we will disclose your Personal Data to such employer who is our customer pursuant to a separate enterprise agreement.
- Service Providers. These parties help us provide the Services or perform business functions on our behalf. They include:
- Hosting, technology and communication providers.
- AI processing providers.
- Security and fraud prevention consultants.
- Support and customer service vendors.
- Product fulfillment and delivery providers.
- Analytics providers.
- Authorized Team Members within your organization, based on your role and permissions.
- Advertising Partners. These parties help us market our services and provide you with other offers that may be of interest to you. They include:
- Ad networks.
- Data brokers.
- Marketing providers.
- Analytics providers that assist with our Interest-Based Advertisements.
Legal Obligations
We may disclose any Personal Data that we collect with third parties in conjunction with any of the activities set forth under the “Other Permitted Purposes for Processing Personal Data” section above.
Business Transfers
All of your Personal Data that we collect may be transferred to a third party if we undergo a merger, acquisition, bankruptcy or other transaction in which that third party assumes control of our business (in whole or in part).
Data that is Not Personal Data
We may create aggregated, de-identified or anonymized data from the Personal Data we collect, including by removing information that makes the data personally identifiable to a particular user. We may use such aggregated, de-identified or anonymized data and disclose it with third parties for our lawful business purposes, including to analyze, build and improve the Services and promote our business, provided that we will not disclose such data in a manner that could identify you.
4. Tracking Tools, Advertising and Opt-Out
The Services use cookies and similar technologies such as pixel tags, web beacons, clear GIFs and JavaScript (collectively, “Cookies”) to enable our servers to recognize your web browser, tell us how and when you visit and use our Services, analyze trends, learn about our user base and operate and improve our Services. Cookies are small pieces of data — usually text files — placed on your computer, tablet, phone or similar device when you use that device to access our Services. We may also supplement the information we collect from you with information received from third parties, including third parties that have placed their own Cookies on your device(s).
Please note that because of our use of Cookies, the Services do not support “Do Not Track” requests sent from a browser at this time.
We use the following types of Cookies:
- Essential Cookies. Essential Cookies are required for providing you with features or services that you have requested. For example, certain Cookies enable you to log into secure areas of our Services. Disabling these Cookies may make certain features and services unavailable.
- Performance/Analytical Cookies. Performance/Analytical Cookies allow us to understand how visitors use our Services. They do this by collecting information about the number of visitors to the Services, what pages visitors view on our Services and how long visitors are viewing pages on the Services. Performance/Analytical Cookies also help us measure the performance of our advertising campaigns in order to help us improve our campaigns and the Services' content for those who engage with our advertising. We use PostHog to help us understand how visitors use our Services and to improve the functionality and user experience. PostHog provides session replay features that allow us to view anonymized or pseudonymized “playbacks” of user interactions (such as clicks, scrolling, and navigation paths) so we can diagnose issues and optimize our services. PostHog uses first-party cookies or similar technologies to associate these interactions with a browser or device. You have the option to opt-out of PostHog's use of Cookies by setting your browser settings to refuse Cookies. For more information, please see PostHog's Privacy Policy at https://posthog.com/privacy.
- Retargeting/Advertising Cookies. Retargeting/Advertising Cookies collect data about your online activity and identify your interests so that we can provide advertising that we believe is relevant to you.
You can decide whether or not to accept Cookies through your internet browser's settings. Most browsers have an option for turning off the Cookie feature, which will prevent your browser from accepting new Cookies, as well as (depending on the sophistication of your browser software) allow you to decide on acceptance of each new Cookie in a variety of ways. You can also delete all Cookies that are already on your device. If you do this, however, you may have to manually adjust some preferences every time you visit our website and some of the Services and functionalities may not work.
To explore what Cookie settings are available to you or to modify your preferences with respect to Cookies, you can access your Cookie management settings by clicking . To find out more information about Cookies generally, including information about how to manage and delete Cookies, please visit http://www.allaboutcookies.org/.
5. Data Security
We seek to protect your Personal Data from unauthorized access, use and disclosure using appropriate physical, technical, organizational and administrative security measures based on the type of Personal Data and how we are processing that data. You should also help protect your data by appropriately selecting and protecting your password and/or other sign-on mechanism; limiting access to your computer or device and browser; and signing off after you have finished accessing your account. Although we work to protect the security of your account and other data that we hold in our records, please be aware that no method of transmitting data over the internet or storing data is completely secure.
6. Data Retention
We retain Personal Data about you for as long as necessary to provide you with our Services or to perform our business or commercial purposes for collecting your Personal Data. When establishing a retention period for specific categories of data, we consider who we collected the data from, our need for the Personal Data, why we collected the Personal Data, and the sensitivity of the Personal Data. In some cases we retain Personal Data for longer, if doing so is necessary to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes or collect fees owed, or is otherwise permitted or required by applicable law, rule or regulation. We may further retain information in an anonymous or aggregated form where that information would not identify you personally.
For example:
- We retain your profile information and credentials for as long as you have an account with us.
- We retain your device/IP data for as long as we need it to ensure that our systems are working appropriately, effectively and efficiently.
7. Personal Data of Children
As noted in the Terms of Use, we do not knowingly collect or solicit Personal Data from children under 18 years of age; if you are a child under the age of 18, please do not attempt to register for or otherwise use the Services or send us any Personal Data. If we learn we have collected Personal Data from a child under 18 years of age, we will delete that information as quickly as possible. If you believe that a child under 18 years of age may have provided Personal Data to us, please contact us at privacy@messa.ai.
8. State Law Privacy Rights
Depending on where you use the Services from you may have certain rights with regard to our processing of your Personal Data when we are the controller. For example, under certain circumstances you may have the right:
- to find out what Personal Data we hold about you;
- to be provided with a copy of your Personal Data;
- to request the correction or deletion of your Personal Data;
- to request that we restrict the processing of your Personal Data;
- to object to the further processing of your Personal Data;
- to withdraw your consent; and
- to request that your provided Personal Data be moved to a third party.
You may also have the right to raise a complaint with your local data protection authority or regulator.
Our contact details are available in the “Contact Information” section below.
California Resident Rights
Under California Civil Code Sections 1798.83-1798.84, California residents are entitled to contact us to prevent disclosure of Personal Data to third parties for such third parties' direct marketing purposes; in order to submit such a request, please contact us at privacy@messa.ai.
Your browser may offer you a “Do Not Track” option, which allows you to signal to operators of websites and web applications and services that you do not wish such operators to track certain of your online activities over time and across different websites. Our Services do not support Do Not Track requests at this time. To find out more about “Do Not Track,” you can visit www.allaboutdnt.com.
Nevada Resident Rights
Please note that we do not currently sell your Personal Data as sales are defined in Nevada Revised Statutes Chapter 603A.
9. Contact Information
If you have any questions or comments about this Privacy Policy, the ways in which we collect and use your Personal Data or your choices and rights regarding such collection and use, please do not hesitate to contact us at: