Privacy Policy

BribieNow (“BribieNow”, “we”, “us”, “our”) is the local service operated by Joshua Raymond Shiels, ABN 93 758 544 313, a sole trader based in Bribie Island, Queensland, Australia. This policy explains how we collect, hold, use, disclose and protect your personal information when you use the BribieNow website at https://bribienow.com.au and any related services (the Service).

We are committed to handling personal information in accordance with the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs). While small businesses are not always required to comply with the Privacy Act, BribieNow uses the APPs as its privacy baseline for the personal information we handle.

If you do not agree with this policy, please do not use the Service.

“Personal information” has the meaning given in the Privacy Act, broadly, information or an opinion about an identified individual, or an individual who is reasonably identifiable, whether true or not and whether recorded in a material form or not.

We only collect personal information that is reasonably necessary to operate the Service. What we collect depends on how you use BribieNow.

Account and profile

• Email address (required for sign-in).
• Display name (optional).
• Profile avatar and banner images, if you upload them.
• Account role (most users are USER; ADMIN and OWNER roles are used internally to manage the Service).
• The date your account was created and last updated.

If you sign in with Google or Facebook, we receive a basic profile (email address, name and an avatar URL where available) through that provider’s OAuth service. We do not receive your Google or Facebook password.

Content you submit

When you submit an event, garage sale, business listing, missing-pet listing or pet sighting, we collect the information you provide. This may include:

• Title, description, photos and category information.
• Suburb and (for garage sales) a public address you choose to share, plus a separate private address used internally for moderation.
• Dates, times, directory-claim evidence and contact details where you choose to provide them.
• For pet sightings: optional reporter name and contact, and a one-way hashed value derived from the reporter’s IP address used to limit abuse. This hash cannot be reversed to recover the IP address.

Saved items and notifications

• The events and businesses you save to your account.
• Notifications generated for your account (read/unread status and links to the relevant item).

Technical and log data

• Server-side request logs (IP address, user agent, timestamp, URL, response status) used for security, abuse prevention, debugging and rate limiting.
• Error and performance data collected by our error monitoring provider, which may include a redacted snapshot of the page or request when an error occurs.
• Aggregated, non-identifying usage data (such as anonymous page views) collected by a cookieless website analytics provider. This is not used to track you across other websites.
• Cookies and similar storage used for authentication sessions and to remember your theme preference (see section 13).

Information we do not deliberately collect

• We do not run advertising trackers.
• We do not collect payment card details (BribieNow is free to use today).
• We do not knowingly collect information from children, see section 12.
• We do not ask you to provide sensitive information such as health information, government identifiers, financial account details or identity documents. Please do not include that information in public submissions.

• Directly from you when you create an account, submit content, save items, or contact us.
• From Google or Facebook when you choose that sign-in option.
• Automatically through cookies, request logs, our error monitoring provider and a cookieless website analytics provider.
• Occasionally from publicly available sources, for example, when we import event listings from public Facebook event pages or ticketing partners (see section 6).

• To provide, operate and improve the Service, including signing you in, displaying your submissions, sending transactional notifications, and showing your saved items.
• To moderate user-submitted content for accuracy, safety and legal compliance.
• To detect, prevent and investigate fraud, spam, abuse and security incidents, including rate limiting and IP hashing for pet sightings.
• To comply with legal obligations and respond to lawful requests.
• To communicate with you about your account or your submissions.

We only send transactional messages today (such as sign-in links and notifications you have opted into within the app). We do not send marketing emails. If we introduce marketing emails in the future, we will obtain your separate consent in accordance with the Spam Act 2003 (Cth) and include an unsubscribe mechanism in every message.

We disclose personal information to a limited number of trusted service providers who help us run BribieNow. We describe those providers by function rather than naming every vendor, so this policy stays clear without exposing unnecessary technical detail. Each provider is required to handle personal information in line with their own privacy and security obligations.

Service providers that may process personal information

• Cloud hosting, database, authentication and file-storage providers that hold or process account data, submissions, uploaded images and server requests.
• Identity providers, including Google and Facebook when you choose one of those sign-in options.
• Error monitoring, performance monitoring and privacy-friendly, cookieless website analytics providers that help us detect and repair faults and understand aggregate, non-identifying usage of the Service.
• Transactional email providers used for account messages, missing-pet sighting relays and other service notifications when email delivery is configured.
• Security, rate-limiting and abuse-prevention providers that track request counts or hashed identifiers to keep the Service reliable.

Public information and data providers

BribieNow also uses third-party sources and tools to display or import public information, such as conditions data, travel-time estimates, event listings, ticketing information and public social event pages. We do not send your account personal information to those providers in normal operation.

We do not sell, rent or trade your personal information.

We may also disclose personal information where required or authorised by law, for example, in response to a court order, a subpoena, or a lawful request from a law-enforcement agency.

Some of the provider categories listed above may store or process information outside Australia. Where that occurs, we take reasonable steps to assess provider privacy and security terms and to handle overseas processing consistently with the APPs. Your personal information may be stored or processed in countries other than Australia, including:

• The United States, where many cloud, authentication, email, diagnostics and security providers operate.
• Other regions where our cloud hosting, database, storage or operational providers maintain infrastructure.

If you would like more information about where a particular item of your personal information is held, email privacy@bribienow.com.au.

Information you submit for publication on BribieNow (for example, an approved event, garage sale, business listing or missing-pet listing) is public once approved. Do not include personal information in those submissions that you do not want to be publicly available. We treat the following submission fields as private and do not publish them:

• The submitter’s email address and account identifier.
• A garage sale’s private address, we publish only the public address or suburb you choose.
• Moderation notes.
• Reporter IP hashes for pet sightings.

We store personal information using reputable cloud infrastructure providers with administrative, technical and physical safeguards including:

• Encrypted transport (HTTPS/TLS).
• Encrypted storage at rest by our hosting providers.
• Strict role-based access, only ADMIN and OWNER accounts can access moderation tools.
• Rate limiting and bot mitigation.
• Error monitoring and security logging.

No method of transmission or storage is 100% secure. If we experience a data breach that is likely to result in serious harm to affected individuals, we will notify those individuals and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) in accordance with the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme under Part IIIC of the Privacy Act.

• Account data is kept while your account is active. You can delete your account at any time from your account settings. When you do, we remove or anonymise the linked personal information, retaining only what we are required to keep for legal, audit or abuse-prevention reasons.
• Submissions that are rejected or archived are retained for moderation history.
• Server logs and error data are typically retained for up to 90 days by our providers.

Under the APPs you have rights to:

• Access the personal information we hold about you (APP 12).
• Correct personal information that is inaccurate, out of date, incomplete, irrelevant or misleading (APP 13).
• Make a complaint about how we have handled your personal information.

To exercise any of these rights, email privacy@bribienow.com.au. We will respond within a reasonable time (usually within 30 days). We may need to verify your identity before acting on a request. There is no charge to make a request, although in unusual cases we may charge reasonable cost recovery and will tell you in advance.

If you are not satisfied with our response, you may complain to the OAIC:

• Website: www.oaic.gov.au
• Phone: 1300 363 992
• Post: GPO Box 5288, Sydney NSW 2001

BribieNow is intended for general audiences but is not directed at children under 16. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 16. If you believe a child has provided us with personal information, please contact privacy@bribienow.com.au and we will delete it.

We use a small number of cookies and similar storage technologies:

• Authentication session cookies used to keep you signed in.
• A local-storage entry recording your light/dark theme preference.
• A small service-worker registration in production for offline support.

We do not use third-party advertising cookies. You can block or delete cookies through your browser settings, but doing so may stop you from being able to sign in.

We may update this policy from time to time. The “Last updated” date at the top will change when we do. Material changes will be highlighted on the website. We will not use changes to this policy to reduce privacy rights you have under applicable law.

For any privacy question or request:

• Email: privacy@bribienow.com.au
• Postal: available on request for privacy complaints or formal correspondence.
• Operator: Joshua Raymond Shiels, ABN 93 758 544 313, Queensland, Australia.

See also our Terms and Conditions.