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, how long for and how far down, what people search for, which sources get clicked. To avoid counting one person as several, those records carry a short scrambled code worked out from your IP address and browser using an ingredient we change every day. It is worked out on our server, it is never sent to your browser, and nothing is stored on your device. It cannot be turned back into your IP address, and because the ingredient changes daily the same person gets a different code tomorrow, so nothing here can be assembled into a history 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 address of the 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.

It also records, for each page you open, roughly how many seconds you stayed and roughly how far down you scrolled, rounded to the nearest quarter of the page. That is there to answer one question we cannot answer any other way: whether a page actually answered what it claims to answer, or whether people arrive, look, and leave. If you follow a link off this site we record the address of the site you went to, never the full link.

It also records roughly where the request came from (country, state and city, worked out by our hosting provider from your IP address, never coordinates) and what kind of browser, operating system and device you used. No version numbers, because browser plus version plus screen size starts to be a fingerprint and we have no question that needs one.

No cookie is set. Nothing whatsoever is written to your device: no browser storage, no fingerprint, nothing another site could read and nothing that could recognise you on one. The daily code described above is the only identifier, it lives only in our records, and it is deliberately built so it cannot outlive the day. We still cannot tell whether you have been here before, and we accept losing that.

The server does not record your IP address, and never stores your browser's full user agent. That is read once, in memory, reduced to the three coarse fields above, and otherwise discarded. Where the user agent identifies itself as a crawler by name, such as a search engine or an AI company's indexing bot, that name is recorded instead. A crawler is not a person and naming it tells us nothing about anybody.

These counts are stored in our own database, hosted in Australia by a database provider acting on our behalf. They are kept while they are useful for deciding what to write and improve.

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

Requests, not just clicks

Separately from the counting above, the server keeps a line for each request that reaches it: which page was asked for, the method, the address of the site the link was followed from, any campaign tag, roughly where the request came from, and, where it was not a crawler, the same coarse browser, operating system and device. The location comes from our hosting provider's own lookup. We never see or store the IP address it was worked out from.

Most of what this catches is not people at all. It exists mainly to see search engine and AI crawlers, which do not run JavaScript and are therefore invisible to the counting described above. Since this site is written to be quoted by those services, knowing which of them have read which pages is genuinely useful to us and involves no person.

These lines deliberately carry NO identifier, not even the daily code. There is nothing joining one request line to the next or to any event, which is the point: this log exists to count crawlers, and a crawler is not somebody whose reading should be assembled into anything.

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 truncated, and it is never joined to a form submission or to anything you typed anywhere else on the site. It carries the same daily code as every other event, which means searches made in one day could in principle be read together, and equally means they cannot be linked to you, to another day, or to anything outside these records. 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. The only identifier on them is the daily scrambled code, which is worked out from your IP address and browser and cannot be worked backwards, so there is no lookup we could run on your behalf even if you asked, and asking us to try would mean handing us the very details we deliberately do not keep. That is the trade the design makes: data that cannot be tied to you cannot be shown to you either.

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.