Privacy

The short version

This site sets no cookies, has no advertising, no login and no third-party trackers. It does not know who you are and has no way of finding out.

It does count what happens on it: which pages get read, what people search for, which sources get clicked. That counting carries no identifier of any kind, so those records cannot be joined together into a picture of a person, including by us.

If you fill in a form, we receive what you typed. That is separate from the counting above and the two are never connected.

What we measure, and what makes it different

We use our own measurement rather than Google Analytics or any equivalent, because we wanted to be able to say exactly what is collected. It records an event name from a fixed list, the page it happened on, the category of site you arrived from, any campaign tag in the link you followed, and one or two plain labels such as which topic or which source was clicked.

There is no identifier attached. No cookie, no browser storage, no fingerprint, no visitor or session id, not even a random one. Two events a minute apart are indistinguishable from two events by two different people, by construction rather than by policy. That means we cannot build a profile, follow you between pages, or tell whether you have been here before, and we accept losing all of that.

The server does not record your IP address and does not store your browser's user agent. The user agent is read once, in memory, only to drop obvious bots from the counts, and then discarded.

We are not selling, sharing or transferring any of it, and there is no advertising or retargeting tag anywhere on this site.

Searches you type into this site

The site's own search box records what was typed, and in particular records searches that found nothing. That is the single most useful thing we have for deciding what to write next, because it is a list of what people needed and we did not have.

This is the most sensitive thing collected here and we treat it that way. A search is recorded on its own, with no identifier, so there is no way to link it to you, to another search, or to anything else you did. It is truncated, and it is never joined to a form submission. If you would rather not have a search recorded at all, the site works perfectly well through the topic and question listings.

The forms

The form on our contact and question pages submits to an endpoint on this site, which emails the message to us and stores nothing. We receive the name and email address you choose to give (both optional), your message, and which page you were on when you sent it.

We use it to reply and to correct the site. It is not added to any mailing list. Delivery is handled by Postmark, an email provider, acting on our behalf.

The forms include a hidden field that real browsers leave empty. It exists only to filter automated spam and collects nothing about you.

If you apply to contribute

The contributor application asks for professional details including a licence number. That reaches the same inbox as anything else and is not stored in a database. The licence number is used to search your state's public register, which is information those states publish themselves; it is not published by us. If you are approved and have agreed to it, what appears on the site is your name, trade, state, licence class and the date the register was checked.

Applying to contribute is not consent to be marketed to. The application carries one separate, optional, unticked box about hearing occasionally about tools or services for a trade business. Leaving it unticked has no effect whatsoever on the application, and we will not use a contributor application as a lead for anything else.

If you decide against it at any point, tell us and we will delete what you sent.

Hosting logs

The site is served by a hosting provider which, like any web host, processes standard server request data such as IP address, user agent and requested URL in order to deliver the page and protect against abuse. We do not build profiles from it, we do not join it to anything, and we do not use it for advertising.

Fonts and third-party requests

Typefaces are self-hosted and served from this domain rather than fetched from a third-party font service, so viewing a page does not cause a request to another company. Pages link out to Australian regulators and standards bodies, and following one of those links takes you to that organisation's site, where their own privacy policy applies.

If you email us

If you email support@tradieanswers.com.au, we receive your email address and whatever you choose to put in the message. We use it to reply and to correct the site. We do not add it to a mailing list. If you would like your correspondence deleted, ask and we will delete it.

Your rights

Australian privacy law gives you rights to access and correct personal information held about you. In practice this applies to a message you have sent us: whether you used a form or emailed directly, you can ask us to show you what we hold, correct it, or delete it. Write to support@tradieanswers.com.au and we will action it.

It does not extend to the usage counts described above, and that is not an evasion. Those records carry no identifier, so there is nothing in them that identifies you and no lookup we could run on your behalf even if you asked. That is the trade the design makes: unlinkable data cannot be shown to you because it was never attached to you.

Children

This is a general reference site about home maintenance and trade regulation. It is not directed at children and collects nothing from anyone.

Changes

If this site adds anything that collects data, this page is updated before that ships, not afterwards. The date at the top shows when it was last reviewed.