What we collect, and what happens to it

If you send an enquiry about a home

The form asks who the place is for, when, and the type of care, then your email address, and if you choose, a phone number and a message. You tick a box to say we may keep these details to answer the enquiry.

• We store the enquiry in our database.
• Our team is then sent an email saying an enquiry arrived: the home, the type of enquiry and the time, with a private link that opens it. Your email address, phone number and message are not in that email.
• The enquiry is not sent to the home or its operator. If we can help, we reply to the email address you gave.
• We do not sell your details or pass them to anyone to market to you.

If you write about a home

The form asks your connection to the home, the text, and if you choose, the years, a rating and an email address. A person reads every review before it appears. Names and contact details found in the text are hidden from the published version. Your email address is used only if we need to ask you about the review, and is never shown.

The cost calculator

The figures you type (a room price, a lump sum, income and assets) are sent to our server to work out the result and are not saved.

While you browse

• Searches. The words you search for are part of the page address. Our web server's access log records page addresses and your IP address, for security and fixing faults, and is deleted after 14 days.
• Homes picked to compare are kept in your own browser (local storage), not on our server.
• Cookies we set. A session cookie and a security token that protect the forms. If a form has a mistake, what you typed is held in that session on our server so the form can be filled back in; the session ends after two hours.

Google Analytics and Google Search Console

We use Google Analytics 4 to count visits to pages. It sets its own cookies. We send it the page address without search words or the homes you compared, and a fixed name for each kind of page. Google Analytics 4 does not store IP addresses, and Google signals and ad personalisation are turned off. Besides page views it records two things: that an enquiry was sent (not what it said) and how many homes were compared. Google keeps this data under its own retention settings. You can block it with Google's opt-out add-on or your browser's tracking protection.

Google Search Console tells us which searches show our pages in Google results and how often they are clicked, in totals. It receives nothing from your visit to this site.

Services that see your visit

• Cloudflare delivers the site and sees each request, including your IP address.
• The site runs on Oracle Cloud servers in Melbourne.
• Where a page shows a map, your browser fetches the map images from Mapbox.
• The email that tells our team an enquiry arrived is sent through Brevo. It holds only the home's name, the type of enquiry, the time and a private link, nothing you typed.

How long we keep things

• Enquiries: deleted automatically 24 months after they arrive, or sooner if you ask.
• Reviews: kept while the review is on the site, or until you ask us to remove it.
• Server access logs: 14 days.

Seeing or deleting your details

Email [email protected] from the address you used, and name the home. We will tell you what we hold, or delete the enquiry or review, and reply within 30 days. If you are not happy with how we handled it, you can contact the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.