Privacy policy

AllTradie is a sole trader in Adelaide, South Australia. Reach me at info@alltradie.com.au.

To answer you, quote your job, and do the work. Once you're a client, to run the build and invoice you.

No marketing list, no newsletter, and nothing gets sold or handed to a data broker. If I ever want to use your job as a case study I'll ask you first, in writing.

Only the services I need to run the business: website and form hosting, email, the calendar booking tool, the spreadsheet tool where enquiries are logged, and accounting software for invoices. Some of them store data overseas.

An analytics and error monitoring service will join that list when I open an account with one, because the counts and the error reports below are worth keeping somewhere I can read them back. Until I do, they go no further than my own server.

Otherwise nobody, unless the law requires it.

This site sets no cookies of its own — not for analytics, not for anything — which is why there is no cookie banner to click through. The one preference it keeps, whether you chose the light or the dark background, stays in your own browser, with one exception: the calendar in the paragraph below. The page timings further down are measured by the host's code rather than mine, and what that code does is the host's to publish.

The nearest this site comes to a cookie is the calendar on the booking page, and it is a choice you make there. The calendar belongs to cal.com, a third-party scheduling tool, and none of it loads until you press the link that opens it — if you never press it, cal.com never sees you at all. Press it and the calendar runs in a frame on the page, where cal.com sees what any site you visit sees: your IP address, your browser, and that you came to it from this site, along with whatever you then type into it. It also sets a cookie of its own inside that frame. That cookie is cal.com's, not this site's, and cal.com's own privacy terms are where all of it is accounted for. One thing in the address that frame opens at is about you, and this site puts it there: which of the two backgrounds you are on. The calendar then arrives on the same background as the page around it.

What I do collect comes in three kinds, and two of them arrive at this site's own server rather than at somebody else's. Analytics: a count of the steps that matter — a quote flow started or finished, a quote issued or one that failed to send, an enquiry submitted, a link to the booking page pressed — with no name, no address and nothing you typed attached to any of them. Some of those counts are raised in your browser and some on my server. A count can carry a little about the step it marks: which page a press was on, whether the job had something on it the flow could not price, the figures my own price list put on it, and which of the optional boxes you filled in rather than what you put in them. Each also carries which copy of the site it was raised on, the live one or a test one, and — in place of anything that could identify you — the same marker for my server on every one.

Error reports: when a page or the server fails, what failed and enough technical detail to fix it. An email address, and a phone number written the Australian way, are taken out by their shape, wherever in the report they turn up. Your name, your business and the rest of what you typed are taken out by matching the report against what the form is holding at the time, which catches those words as you typed them and can miss two things: a copy your browser has rewritten on the way — inside a web address, say, or split across a line — and anything you typed that is shorter than four characters, because three letters match too much ordinary writing to strike out safely. So a report is cleaned of what you typed rather than guaranteed free of it, and nothing you typed is ever put in one on purpose.

Page timings are the third kind, and the one that goes somewhere else: how quickly a page loaded and answered you, measured in your own browser and sent back to the company that hosts this site. A timing carries how long something took and the page it was taken on. It may carry more than that — what the browser was, what the connection was like — because the code that takes the measurement is that company's own, even though it arrives from this site's own address rather than from anywhere else. The full list is theirs to publish rather than mine. What I can tell you is what I put in one, which is nothing: I hand that code no name, no address and nothing you typed on this site. It happens on every copy of the site that company serves, including the ones I use to check a change before it goes live.

Neither of the two kinds I collect is sold, shared for advertising, or joined to anything that identifies you. Until the account above exists they go to my own server and no further. When it does, they will go on to PostHog, which holds its data in the European Union, and my server will stay the only thing that talks to it. The timings are the host company's to account for, and their own privacy terms are where that account is.

Enquiries that don't turn into work get deleted after twelve months. Client records stay as long as the tax rules say they have to, which is seven years for anything tied to an invoice.

Email me and I'll tell you what I hold about you, fix anything wrong, or delete it where I'm allowed to. No charge, and I'll come back to you within a week.

If you're not happy with how I've handled it, you can take it to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.