When does a scan send a text or call?

Your contacts are alerted when a person opens your page: someone scans your code, or types your page's address. They are not alerted by software that opens the page without a person behind it.

What alerts your contacts

Someone scanning your code with a phone camera.
Someone opening your page from its web address.

A first look from a phone alerts your contacts straight away. Nothing waits.

What does not alert them

Link previews. If you send your page's link in a text, email or chat, the app may open it to draw a preview. That does not alert anyone.
Search engines and automated link checkers, including the ones some email services use to check links before you click them.
Your contacts opening the link we texted them. Reading your page because we alerted them does not alert everyone again.
You, on your own phone. Once you have opened your WearableDocs account in a phone's browser, we recognize that browser as yours, and your own visits there do not alert anyone.

When an alert waits for someone to read the page

Some visits alert only once someone taps or scrolls the page:

A phone coming back to your page later. A phone that already looked at your page, looking again more than 10 minutes later, alerts your contacts when someone touches the page. A browser reloading an old tab by itself does not.
Visits that come through networks automated tools use. A person on one of those networks still alerts your contacts as soon as they tap or scroll.

The same phone looking again within 10 minutes counts as one look.

Testing your own code

It is fine to scan your code when your wearable arrives to check it works. If you scan it with a phone where you have opened your account in the same browser, no one is alerted. On any other phone, a test scan alerts your contacts like any real scan, so let them know before you test.

When your contacts are called

If you chose Text and call for a contact, we call them about five minutes after the text if no one has opened the link in it or replied. Opening the link is how a contact shows us they saw the alert. Contacts you chose to call only are called straight away.

Limits

Each contact receives at most 20 texts in any 24 hours. Past that, we stop texting them until the count drops and email you instead, naming who was not texted. Every scan is still recorded.