Privacy Policy

Schoolect is a registered business name of a partnership registered in Australia, ABN 86 143 310 778, based in New South Wales. That partnership is the entity responsible for the personal information described in this policy.

This Privacy Policy for Schoolect ('we', 'us', or 'our') describes how and why we might access, collect, store, use, and/or share ('process') your personal information when you use our services ('Services'), including when you:

• Visit our website at https://schoolect.com.au or any website of ours that links to this Privacy Policy
• Engage with us in other related ways, including any marketing or events

Reading this Privacy Policy will help you understand your privacy rights and choices. We are responsible for making decisions about how your personal information is processed. If you do not agree with our policies and practices, please do not use our Services.

Summary of Key Points

This summary provides key points from our Privacy Policy. You can find out more details about any of these topics in the full sections below.

• What personal information do we process? When you visit, use, or navigate our Services, we may process personal information depending on how you interact with us and the Services, the choices you make, and the features you use.
• Do we process any sensitive personal information? We do not process sensitive personal information.
• Do we collect any information from third parties? We receive limited payment information from Stripe when you buy a pass, such as whether a payment succeeded and the reference numbers for it. We never receive your card details. We do not buy personal information from data brokers.
• Do we use artificial intelligence? Yes. When you ask a question about schools, your request is sent to third-party AI providers to generate an answer. Your questions are not used to train AI models. Even so, questions are reused and shared, so do not include personal information in one. See section 3.
• How do we process your information? We process your information to provide, improve, and administer our Services, to take payment, to answer your questions about schools, to communicate with you, for security and fraud prevention, and to comply with law.
• With whom do we share personal information? We share information with the service providers we rely on to run Schoolect, including Supabase, Stripe, Google, PostHog, Cloudflare, and our AI providers. Section 6 lists all of them and what each one receives.
• Is your information sent overseas? Yes. Several of our providers are located outside Australia, principally in the United States and Japan. See section 6.
• How do we keep your information safe? We have adequate organisational and technical processes and procedures in place to protect your personal information. However, no electronic transmission over the internet can be guaranteed to be 100% secure.
• What are your rights? Depending on where you are located geographically, the applicable privacy law may mean you have certain rights regarding your personal information.

1. What Information Do We Collect?

Personal information you provide to us

In Short: We collect personal information that you voluntarily provide to us.

We collect personal information that you voluntarily provide to us when you express an interest in obtaining information about us or our products and Services, when you participate in activities on the Services, or otherwise when you contact us.

Personal information provided by you. The personal information that we collect depends on the context of your interactions with us and the Services, the choices you make, and the features you use. The personal information we collect may include:

• Email address. When you create an account, sign up for our mailing list, or contact us.
• Your name. Optional, if you choose to add it to your account profile.
• Addresses and locations you enter. When you search for schools near a place or check a catchment. If you are signed in and save your search settings, the place name and its coordinates are stored against your account so we can restore your search next time.
• What you type into search and questions. The text of your searches and the questions you ask about schools.
• Your shortlist. The schools you save, and any shortlist you choose to share by link.
• Purchase records. If you buy a pass, we record the amount, currency, dates, status, and the reference numbers Stripe gives us. See section 3.

How you sign in. You can sign in with a one-time code sent to your email address, or with your Google account. We do not use passwords and never store one. If you sign in with Google, Google tells us your email address and confirms the sign in; we do not receive your Google password. The sign-in form is protected by Cloudflare Turnstile, which checks that you are not a bot.

Searching without an account. You can run a search without signing up. To keep that free and stop it being abused, we set a cookie holding a random value that identifies your browser, and Cloudflare Turnstile checks that you are not a bot. The cookie does not hold your name, email, or address. We use it to count your free search for the week and to let you reopen your results, and it is cleared once you create an account. A search you ran without an account is deleted after 30 days if you never claim it.

Sensitive information. We do not ask for sensitive information as the Privacy Act defines it, and you should not enter any. In particular, do not include details about your child, their health, or their background in a search or a question about schools.

All personal information that you provide to us must be true, complete, and accurate, and you must notify us of any changes to such personal information.

Information automatically collected

In Short: Some information — such as your Internet Protocol (IP) address and/or browser and device characteristics — is collected automatically when you visit our Services.

We automatically collect certain information when you visit, use, or navigate the Services. This information does not reveal your specific identity (like your name) but may include device and usage information, such as your IP address, browser and device characteristics, operating system, language preferences, referring URLs, device name, country, location, information about how and when you use our Services, and other technical information. This information is primarily needed to maintain the security and operation of our Services, and for our internal analytics and reporting purposes.

Like many businesses, we also collect information through cookies and similar technologies. You can find out more about this in our Cookie Policy.

The information we collect includes:

• Log and usage data. Log and usage data is service-related, diagnostic, usage, and performance information our servers automatically collect when you access or use our Services and which we record in log files. This log data may include your IP address, device information, browser type and settings, and information about your activity in the Services (such as the date/time stamps associated with your usage, pages and files viewed, searches, and other actions you take such as which features you use), device event information (such as system activity and error reports), and hardware settings.
• Analytics data. We use PostHog, a product analytics platform, to understand how visitors interact with our Services. PostHog collects pseudonymous usage data including page views, feature interactions, search activity, and navigation patterns. For signed-in users, we send PostHog an internal account ID so activity can be counted across sessions. We do not send your email address or name to PostHog. Search text sent to analytics is cryptographically hashed. We may also send broad location fields such as suburb, state, and country, but not a street address or coordinates.

Location data

When you search for schools you may enter an address. That address is sent to the Google Places API to turn it into coordinates (latitude and longitude) so we can find schools near it. Google receives the address text you type. We do not collect your device's location in the background, and we only use precise location if you explicitly ask us to use your current position.

If you are signed in and save your search settings, we store the place name and its coordinates against your account so we can restore your search on your next visit. You can change or clear these at any time by running a new search or by deleting your account. If you are not signed in, the location is used for that search only and is not stored on our servers.

Addresses are cryptographically hashed before being included in any analytics event, so our analytics never contain the address itself.

Browser local storage

We store some data in your browser's local storage so the site remembers what you were doing. This stays on your device and is not sent to our servers unless you take an action that needs it, such as sharing your shortlist. It includes your shortlist (stored as school identifiers), your cookie choice, your preferred results view, dismissed hints, and the last address you used to browse schools or check a catchment. You can remove all of it by clearing site data in your browser. Our Cookie Policy lists every key by name.

Google API

Our use of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

2. Payment Information

In Short: Stripe handles the payment. We never see or store your card details.

When you buy a pass, we send you to a checkout page hosted by Stripe. You enter your card details on Stripe's page, not ours. We never receive, see, or store your card number, expiry date, or security code.

We pass your email address to Stripe so it can send you a receipt. Stripe tells us whether the payment succeeded and gives us reference numbers for the payment. Against your account we store those reference numbers, the amount, the currency, the status of the pass, and the dates it starts and ends, together with refund and dispute details if either happens. We keep these records for as long as we need them for tax, accounting, and dispute purposes, which is generally seven years.

Stripe processes your payment as its own controller and handles your card details under Stripe's privacy policy.

3. Artificial Intelligence and Your Questions

In Short: What you type is sent to third-party AI providers. Do not put personal information in a question.

Schoolect lets you ask a question and have it answered for every school in your results. Answering it involves sending text to AI providers outside Australia.

• What is sent. The question or search description you type, and for location-aware searches the place you selected. We instruct the AI provider not to carry personal details from your request into the stored question, but the text you type is transmitted as you wrote it.
• Who receives it. Google generates the answers, using its Gemini models. OpenAI is used only to turn text into numeric representations so we can search our own records, never to generate answers.
• Your questions are not used to train AI models. We use these services on their paid tiers, under which the provider does not use the text we send, or the answers it returns, to train or improve its models. We do not sell or share your questions with anyone for their own purposes.
• What we store. Your question and search text are stored against your account so you can see what you asked. We also record which model answered and when.
• Questions and answers are shared. Your question is turned into a general, reusable question, which is added to a shared catalogue that other users can see and reuse. The answers produced for each school are stored and shown to other users too. Your name, email address, and account are never attached to a shared question or answer.
• Monitoring. We send technical traces about how the AI performed to Langfuse, a service hosted in Japan, so we can spot failures and cost problems. It is configured not to record the content of prompts or answers.

Please do not include personal information about you, your child, or anyone else in a question. Because questions are reused and shared, anything personal you type could be seen by others.

Answers are generated automatically and can be wrong. They are general information, not advice. Our Terms of Service explain this in full.

Agent access and connected AI hosts

You can connect an AI agent to Schoolect. The AI host you choose receives the tool results so it can respond to you. That host is an independent third-party service, not a provider acting for Schoolect. Its own terms and privacy policy govern what it does with the results it receives.

Schoolect receives your authenticated tool inputs, such as school filters, school identifiers, and evidence questions. OpenAI receives only the evidence question to create an embedding that searches records held in our database. Schoolect does not use its own AI model to generate your agent host's answer. Do not put personal or sensitive information about you, your child, or anyone else in a tool request.

A school saved through a connected agent is added to your Schoolect shortlist. Our operational logs record request metadata and a pseudonymous account reference, not your questions, exact addresses, evidence snippets, or complete tool results.

You can revoke a connected agent from your Account page at schoolect.com.au/en-AU/account. Revocation stops future access to Schoolect, but it cannot remove information the independent host already received. Contact that host about its retained data.

4. Automated Decision-Making

We do not use computer programs to make, or to do anything substantially and directly related to making, decisions that could reasonably be expected to significantly affect your rights or interests.

Our search, ranking, and question-answering features produce information about schools for you to consider and weigh up yourself. They do not make decisions about you, they do not assess you or your child, and they do not determine your access to any service, benefit, or entitlement. Deciding which school is right for your family is yours to make.

We keep this section under review against the transparency requirements for automated decisions introduced into the Privacy Act by the Privacy and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2024, which take effect on 10 December 2026.

5. How Do We Process Your Information?

In Short: We process your information to provide, improve, and administer our Services, communicate with you, for security and fraud prevention, and to comply with law. We may also process your information for other purposes with your consent.

We process your personal information for a variety of reasons, depending on how you interact with our Services, including:

• To provide the Services. To create and run your account, show you schools near a place you choose, keep your shortlist, and remember your search settings.
• To answer your questions about schools. To send your question to our AI providers, generate answers, and show them to you. See section 3.
• To take payment and manage your pass. To process your purchase through Stripe, give you access for the period you paid for, handle refunds and disputes, and keep the records we need for tax and accounting.
• For security and to prevent abuse. To check the sign-in form is not being used by a bot, apply rate limits, and protect the site from attack.
• To respond to user inquiries and offer support. We may process your information to respond to your inquiries and solve any potential issues you might have with the requested service.
• To send administrative information to you. We may process your information to send you details about our products and services, changes to our terms and policies, and other similar information.
• To send you marketing and promotional communications. We may process the personal information you send to us for our marketing purposes, if this is in accordance with your marketing preferences. You can opt out of our marketing emails at any time. For more information, see the 'What Are Your Privacy Rights?' section below.
• To evaluate and improve our Services, products, marketing, and your experience. We may process your information when we believe it is necessary to identify usage trends, determine the effectiveness of our promotional campaigns, and to evaluate and improve our Services, products, marketing, and your experience.
• To identify usage trends. We may process information about how you use our Services to better understand how they are being used so we can improve them.

6. When and With Whom Do We Share Your Personal Information?

In Short: We share information with the providers we rely on to run Schoolect. We do not sell your personal information.

We share your information with third-party providers who perform services for us and need access to do that work. Each one receives only what it needs. We do not sell your personal information, and we do not disclose it to advertisers to build a profile of you.

Sending information overseas

As the table shows, several of these providers are located outside Australia, principally in the United States, and in the case of our AI monitoring provider, Japan. By using the Services you acknowledge that your personal information may be disclosed to recipients in those countries.

We take reasonable steps to ensure overseas recipients handle your personal information in a way consistent with the Australian Privacy Principles, including by choosing established providers that commit to appropriate data-protection terms. Once your information is with an overseas recipient, it may also be subject to the laws of that country.

Other situations

• Shared shortlists. If you create a share link for your shortlist, anyone with that link can see the schools on it and any questions attached to it. The link does not show your name or email address. You can revoke it at any time.
• Legal reasons. We may disclose your information where we are required to by law, or where it is reasonably necessary to protect our rights, your safety, or the safety of others.
• Business transfers. We may share or transfer your information in connection with, or during negotiations of, any merger, sale of company assets, financing, or acquisition of all or a portion of our business to another company.

7. What Is Our Stance on Third-Party Websites?

In Short: We are not responsible for the safety of any information that you share with third parties that we may link to or who are not affiliated with our Services.

The Services may link to third-party websites, online services, or mobile applications that are not affiliated with us. Accordingly, we do not make any guarantee regarding any such third parties, and we will not be liable for any loss or damage caused by the use of such third-party websites, services, or applications. The inclusion of a link towards a third-party website, service, or application does not imply an endorsement by us. We cannot guarantee the safety and privacy of data you provide to any third-party websites. Any data collected by third parties is not covered by this Privacy Policy. We are not responsible for the content or privacy and security practices and policies of any third parties, including other websites, services, or applications that may be linked to or from the Services. You should review the policies of such third parties and contact them directly to respond to your questions.

8. Do We Use Cookies and Other Tracking Technologies?

In Short: We may use cookies and other tracking technologies to collect and store your information.

We may use cookies and similar tracking technologies (like web beacons and pixels) to gather information when you interact with our Services. Some online tracking technologies help us maintain the security of our Services, prevent crashes, fix bugs, save your preferences, and assist with basic site functions.

We do not show third-party ads on Schoolect, and we do not use cookies to build an advertising profile of you or sell your information to advertisers.

We do advertise Schoolect on Google. If you accept cookies, we load Google's conversion tag so we can measure how many people who clicked one of our ads went on to sign up. If you decline, that tag is never loaded. Analytics work the same way: off unless you accept. Our Cookie Policy lists every cookie and storage key by name.

9. How Long Do We Keep Your Information?

In Short: We keep your information for as long as we need it, and longer where the law requires it. Some records survive account deletion.

We keep your personal information for as long as it is necessary for the purposes set out in this Privacy Policy, unless a longer period is required or permitted by law. In particular:

• Account details are kept while your account is open.
• Purchase and refund records are kept for around seven years for tax, accounting, and dispute purposes, even after you delete your account.
• Payment event records we receive from Stripe are automatically deleted after 90 days. We only ever store reference numbers, never the contents of the event.
• Background jobs that answer your questions are deleted after 7 days.
• Questions and answers about schools are kept indefinitely, because they are shared and reused. They are not linked to your identity once they enter the shared catalogue.
• Mailing list entries are kept until you unsubscribe.

When we have no ongoing need to process your personal information, we will delete or de-identify it, or, if that is not immediately possible (for example, because it sits in a backup), securely store it and isolate it from further processing until deletion is possible.

10. How Do We Keep Your Information Safe?

In Short: We aim to protect your personal information through a system of organisational and technical security measures.

We have implemented appropriate and reasonable technical and organisational security measures designed to protect the security of any personal information we process. However, despite our safeguards and efforts to secure your information, no electronic transmission over the Internet or information storage technology can be guaranteed to be 100% secure, so we cannot promise or guarantee that hackers, cybercriminals, or other unauthorised third parties will not be able to defeat our security and improperly collect, access, steal, or modify your information. Although we will do our best to protect your personal information, transmission of personal information to and from our Services is at your own risk. You should only access the Services within a secure environment.

If a data breach occurs that is likely to result in serious harm, we will assess it and notify affected individuals and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner as required by the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme in Part IIIC of the Privacy Act.

11. Do We Collect Information From Minors?

In Short: We do not knowingly collect data from or market to children under 18 years of age.

We do not knowingly collect, solicit data from, or market to children under 18 years of age, nor do we knowingly sell such personal information. By using the Services, you represent that you are at least 18 or that you are the parent or guardian of such a minor and consent to such minor dependent's use of the Services. If we learn that personal information from users less than 18 years of age has been collected, we will deactivate the account and take reasonable measures to promptly delete such data from our records.

12. What Are Your Privacy Rights?

In Short: You may review, change, or terminate your account at any time, depending on your country, province, or state of residence.

Withdrawing your consent

If we are relying on your consent to process your personal information, which may be express and/or implied consent depending on the applicable law, you have the right to withdraw your consent at any time. You can withdraw your consent by contacting us using the contact form on our website. To withdraw your consent to analytics and advertising measurement specifically, clear the site data for schoolect.com.au in your browser and choose Decline when the cookie banner appears again.

However, please note that this will not affect the lawfulness of the processing before its withdrawal nor, when applicable law allows, will it affect the processing of your personal information conducted in reliance on lawful processing grounds other than consent.

Opting out of marketing and promotional communications

You can unsubscribe from our marketing and promotional communications at any time by clicking on the unsubscribe link in the emails that we send, or by contacting us. You will then be removed from the marketing lists. However, we may still communicate with you — for example, to send you service-related messages that are necessary for the administration and use of your account, to respond to service requests, or for other non-marketing purposes.

Cookies and similar technologies

Most web browsers are set to accept cookies by default. If you prefer, you can usually choose to set your browser to remove cookies and to reject cookies. If you choose to remove cookies or reject cookies, this could affect certain features or services of our Services. For further information, please see our Cookie Policy.

13. Controls for Do-Not-Track Features

Most web browsers and some mobile operating systems and mobile applications include a Do-Not-Track ('DNT') feature or setting you can activate to signal your privacy preference not to have data about your online browsing activities monitored and collected. At this stage, no uniform technology standard for recognising and implementing DNT signals has been finalised. As such, we do not currently respond to DNT browser signals or any other mechanism that automatically communicates your choice not to be tracked online. If a standard for online tracking is adopted that we must follow in the future, we will inform you about that practice in a revised version of this Privacy Policy.

14. Australia-Specific Privacy Rights

We collect and process your personal information under the obligations and conditions set by Australia's Privacy Act 1988 (Privacy Act).

This Privacy Policy satisfies the notice requirements defined in the Privacy Act, in particular: what personal information we collect from you, from which sources, for which purposes, and other recipients of your personal information.

If you do not wish to provide the personal information necessary to fulfil their applicable purpose, it may affect our ability to provide our services, in particular:

• Offer you the products or services that you want
• Respond to or help with your requests

At any time, you have the right to request access to or correction of your personal information. You can make such a request by contacting us using the contact form on our website.

If you believe we are unlawfully processing your personal information, you have the right to submit a complaint about a breach of the Australian Privacy Principles to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.

15. Do We Make Updates to This Policy?

In Short: Yes, we will update this policy as necessary to stay compliant with relevant laws.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. The updated version will be indicated by an updated 'Last updated' date at the top of this Privacy Policy. If we make material changes to this Privacy Policy, we may notify you either by prominently posting a notice of such changes or by directly sending you a notification. We encourage you to review this Privacy Policy frequently to be informed of how we are protecting your information.

16. How Can You Review, Update, or Delete Your Information?

You have the right to request access to the personal information we hold about you, ask how we have processed it, correct anything inaccurate, or ask us to delete it. These rights may be limited in some circumstances by law. To make a request, contact us using the contact form on our website.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account yourself from your Account page. When you do, we sign you out everywhere, remove your name, clear the location saved against your search settings, and close your account so you can no longer sign in.

To be clear about what this does not do: deleting your account does not erase everything immediately. Your past searches, shortlists, any shortlist you shared by link, your mailing list entry, and your purchase records are kept, for the reasons and periods described in section 9. Questions you asked remain in the shared catalogue, no longer linked to you.

If you want that remaining information erased as well, use the contact form on our website and ask for a full erasure. We will erase everything we are not legally required to keep, and tell you what we had to keep and why.