Privacy Policy
This policy explains how we collect, use, store and protect personal information when a business uses Hey Marge to text its customers, or when you deal with us directly as a client business. It follows the Australian Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs) - we follow these as good practice regardless of whether our turnover or a client's would otherwise bring either of us under the Privacy Act's small-business threshold (currently A$3 million a year).
1. Who this applies to
- Customers - anyone a client business texts quotes, reminders, invoices or review requests to using Hey Marge.
- Clients - the business owners (tradies, removalists, cleaners, pest controllers and similar) who pay for the Service.
2. What we collect
From customers, as part of a quote, booking or invoice:
- Name, phone number, suburb/address and a description of the job - only what's needed to send a quote, invoice or reminder.
- The text messages exchanged with the client business through the Service.
From clients, when they sign up:
- Business name, ABN, contact details, licence number (where relevant), service area, pricing, bank details for invoicing and billing information.
We don't ask customers for anything beyond what's needed to action the quote, booking or invoice. We don't collect sensitive information (health, etc.) on purpose, though a customer might mention something in passing - if that happens, it's stored only as part of the job record and used only to understand the job, never for any other purpose.
3. How we use this information
- To send quotes, 24h booking confirmations, invoices, payment reminders and review requests, in the client business's own name.
- To follow up automatically if a quote or invoice goes quiet, on the schedule the client business has agreed to.
- To send the client business a summary of what's happening with their jobs.
- To improve Marge (e.g. reviewing message exchanges to fix mistakes or awkward wording), never to build a marketing profile of individual customers.
- To meet our own legal, accounting and dispute-resolution needs.
We do not sell personal information. We do not use customer data for advertising or share it with third parties for their own marketing.
4. Who we share it with
- The client business the customer is dealing with (that's the whole point of the message).
- Twilio Inc., our SMS provider, to send and receive text messages on the client business's behalf.
- Anthropic, whose AI Marge optionally uses to help read trickier, messier messages - only the text of that one message, nothing else, and only when that feature is switched on for a business.
- Cloudflare, which protects the Service from attacks and helps pages load quickly - it handles traffic passing through, not a copy of your stored records.
- Law enforcement or other parties, only if required by law.
We only use providers with reasonable security and privacy commitments. See section 5 for where these providers are based.
5. Where your information is stored
Hey Marge runs on a server in Perth, Western Australia - that's where your business and customer records are stored. Running the Service also involves two overseas providers: Twilio (United States) carries your text messages, and, if a business has Marge's optional AI reading feature switched on, Anthropic (United States) is sent the text of an individual message to help read it. We disclose this overseas handling here as required by Australian Privacy Principle 8. By using Hey Marge, you agree to this disclosure.
6. Data retention
- Job and message records are kept while a client's account is active, and afterwards for as long as needed to resolve disputes or meet legal obligations, unless deletion is requested sooner (see section 8).
- Invoices and quotes sent to a customer are the client's own business record once sent; we don't control what they do with them after that.
- Client business/billing records are kept for as long as needed for accounting and legal obligations (commonly 7 years for financial records under Australian tax law).
- Backups are kept on a rolling basis (currently up to 14 days) so a deletion request can take a short time to clear from backups too.
7. Security
We take reasonable technical and organisational steps to protect personal information from misuse, loss and unauthorised access - including restricted administrator access and secure hosting - and we rely on our service providers' own security measures too. No system is 100% secure, and we can't guarantee against every possible breach, but we'll notify affected clients and, where required by the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) and affected individuals, if a breach occurs that's likely to cause serious harm.
8. Deleting your data
If a client business wants to leave Hey Marge, or a customer wants their own number and job history removed, contact us at [email protected] and we'll action it. We'll delete what we hold, except anything we're required to keep for legal or accounting reasons, and except that we keep a bare record that a phone number opted out of texts (no name, no message content) - that's what keeps a STOP request working even after the rest of that person's data is gone.
9. Access, correction and complaints
Anyone (customer or client) can ask us:
- what personal information we hold about them,
- to correct it if it's wrong, or
- to delete their record, subject to our legal retention obligations above.
Contact [email protected] to make a request. We'll respond within a reasonable time (aim for 30 days). If someone's not happy with how we've handled their information, they can also complain to the OAIC (oaic.gov.au).
10. SMS messages and the Spam Act
Quote, 24h booking confirmation and invoice texts are transactional - about an existing job a customer already asked the business about - not marketing. Review requests and 12-month service reminders are treated as marketing-style messages under the Spam Act 2003 (Cth): every one of these carries the client business's identity and a clear, easy opt-out ("Reply STOP"). A customer who opts out still receives transactional messages about an active job unless they ask the business to stop entirely.
Getting a customer's consent to send them a marketing-style message is the client business's responsibility, same as if they'd sent that text themselves. Marge won't send marketing texts without recorded consent - that's a safeguard being built into the Service to back up that responsibility, not a replacement for it. Marge also won't send texts between 8pm and 8am Perth time by default (a business can set its own quieter window), holding anything due in that window until the next morning instead.
11. Children
This service is not directed at children and we don't knowingly collect information specifically from or about children beyond what a customer might mention incidentally during a normal job exchange.
12. Changes to this policy
We may update this policy from time to time. The "last updated" date at the top will change, and material changes will be communicated to clients.
13. Contact
Questions or requests about this policy: [email protected].