Privacy policy — AEC Assistant

AEC Assistant is operated by Vove.AI Pty Ltd (ABN 66 682 176 414). We are bound by the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles. This policy explains what personal information we collect when you use the website at www.aecassistant.com.au and the application at app.aecassistant.com.au, why we collect it, who we share it with, how long we keep it, and how you can access, correct or delete it.

In short

We collect your name and email address to run your account, and whatever you choose to put into the Service: questions, documents, project details.
Your questions and documents are sent to our AI provider, OpenAI, in the United States, to produce answers. They are not used to train models.
We do not sell personal information, and we do not show advertising.
We use product analytics to improve the Service. In Australia they run from your first visit on the strength of this policy; where the law requires prior consent, they wait until you accept. You can opt out at any time. The marketing website uses Google Analytics, PostHog and Cloudflare Web Analytics under the same rule.
You can delete your account yourself at any time. Deletion is immediate.
Questions and complaints go to support@aecassistant.com.au, and you can take a complaint to the Australian privacy regulator.

1. What we collect

Account details. Your name, your email address and, if you sign in with Google or Microsoft, the identifier that provider gives us for you. We never see or store a password. A profession and a home state or territory, if you set them, so answers can be scoped to your work.

Billing. Payments are processed by Lemon Squeezy, which collects your card and billing details directly. We receive and keep the subscription: plan, seats, renewal date, the customer and subscription identifiers Lemon Squeezy assigns, and the receipts. We never hold card numbers.

Content you put in. The questions you ask and the conversations that follow, documents you upload to a project or attach to a question, project names, addresses and descriptions, the notes the assistant keeps about you, your firm and your projects (the "memory" you can edit in Settings), and feedback you give on an answer. If you dictate a question, your browser's own speech recognition turns it into text; we receive only the text.

Team information. If you belong to a team, the team's name, who its members are and their roles, and who has been invited.

Usage and audit records. A record of each run the assistant performs for you, including its computing cost, so usage limits can be applied. An audit log of security-relevant events such as sign-ins, team changes, sharing and deletions.

Technical information. Your IP address, browser and device type, and the approximate country your connection comes from, which we use to decide whether the law requires us to ask before running analytics. Product analytics: which pages and features are used and how, and error reports, subject to section 7.

Correspondence. What you send us when you write to support, and our replies.

2. Where it comes from

Mostly from you. Some comes from other sources:

Google or Microsoft, when you use them to sign in: your name, email address and provider identifier.
Lemon Squeezy, when you buy or change a plan.
A team owner who invites you, who gives us your email address.
Public data about a project's address, which the Service fetches on your behalf: geocoding from Mapbox, the local council from OpenStreetMap, and zoning, overlays, hazards and utilities from state and territory planning portals. That is information about a site, not about you, but the address you enter is sent to those services to fetch it.

3. Why we use it

To provide the Service. Answering your questions, indexing and searching your documents, running reports, keeping projects and teams in order, and applying the usage limits your plan carries.
To bill you and to keep the records that tax and company law require.
To keep the Service secure: sign-in codes, session management, fraud and abuse detection, and the audit log.
To tell you what has happened to your account: sign-in codes, receipts, team and plan changes, and changes to our terms. These notices are part of the Service and continue while you have an account.
To send you marketing email, only with your consent. See section 8.
To understand and improve the Service, using product analytics (section 7) and aggregated, de-identified usage information. We read individual conversations only to investigate a problem you have reported, a suspected abuse, or a legal requirement.
To comply with the law and to establish, exercise or defend legal claims.

4. How answers are produced: our AI provider

To answer a question, the Service sends the question, the relevant conversation history, the notes it keeps for you, and excerpts of any documents that are relevant, to OpenAI, our AI provider, whose systems are in the United States. Documents you upload to a project are stored with OpenAI's file service and indexed there so they can be searched. When the assistant searches the web on your behalf, the search is also performed through OpenAI.

OpenAI does not use data sent through its API to train its models. It may retain that data for up to 30 days to detect abuse, after which it is deleted, and it holds the files and search indexes we store with it until we delete them. We do not use your content to train models of our own.

The assistant can take actions that change project data, such as renaming or removing something. It asks you to approve each such action before it happens.

5. Who we share it with

We share personal information only with the providers we need to run the Service, with the people you choose to share it with, and where the law requires. We do not sell it.

OpenAI (United States): questions, conversation history, notes and documents, as described in section 4.
Cloudflare (worldwide network): hosts the marketing website and the Service, its database and its file storage, sends sign-in codes and some account notices, and measures page performance without cookies (section 7).
Lemon Squeezy (United States): sells the subscription as merchant of record and processes payment.
Brevo (European Union): sends account notices and, with your consent, marketing email, and holds your name, email address and consent status for that purpose.
PostHog (United States): product analytics, as described in section 7.
Google Analytics (Google LLC, United States): visit counts on the marketing website, as described in section 7.
Google and Microsoft: when you use them to sign in.
Mapbox (United States) and OpenStreetMap: the address you enter for a project, so it can be located and its council identified.
State and territory planning portals: the address, so planning information can be fetched for the site.
People you share with: members of your team see the team's shared projects; a person you invite to a project sees that project; anyone with a public share link sees the conversation snapshot it publishes.
Regulators, courts and law enforcement, where we are required to, or to protect the rights and safety of users or the public.
A buyer of the business, if the Service changes hands, in which case this policy continues to apply and we will tell you.

6. Overseas disclosure

Several of the providers above are outside Australia, principally in the United States and the European Union, and Cloudflare stores data on a network that spans many countries. By using the Service you agree to your information being handled there. We choose providers that commit contractually to protecting the data we send them and to using it only to provide their service to us, and we send each one no more than it needs.

7. Cookies and analytics

The marketing website stores your appearance preference and your analytics choice in your browser. It uses Google Analytics (Google LLC, United States) to count visits and see which pages are read, and PostHog (United States) to see which pages lead people to try the Service; each sets its own cookies for that purpose, and a PostHog cookie is shared with the application so that a visit here and a sign-up there count as one journey. Cloudflare Web Analytics (Cloudflare, Inc., United States) measures page performance without cookies or any identifier. The same rule applies as for the application below: in Australia and most other countries these run from your first visit, on the strength of this policy; in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland nothing is recorded until you accept the notice the website shows. None of it is used for advertising, and you can block it with a browser setting or Google's opt-out add-on.

The application uses cookies that are necessary for it to work: your signed-in session, your preferences, and a record of your analytics choice. It also uses product analytics from PostHog so we can see which features are used, where people get stuck and where errors happen, and improve the Service accordingly. In Australia and most other countries those analytics run from your first visit, on the strength of this policy, and you can opt out at any time from the application. In the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, where the law requires prior consent, nothing is recorded until you accept the notice the application shows. We do not use advertising cookies or cross-site tracking, and analytics never include the content of your questions or documents.

8. Marketing email

We send product news and offers by email only if you have agreed to receive them. You are asked when you set up your account; a paying customer who was never asked may be treated as having consented under the Spam Act 2003 (Cth), and told so in the first email. Every marketing email carries an unsubscribe link, and you can also withdraw consent in Settings. Withdrawing it stops marketing email but not the account notices in section 3, which continue while you have an account. Separately, Settings lets you switch off the occasional tips email about using the Service.

9. Security

Sign-in is by one-time code or by your Google or Microsoft account, so there is no password to be stolen or reused.
Sessions expire and can be revoked. Removing someone from a team closes their sessions.
Data travels over encrypted connections and is stored with providers who encrypt it at rest.
A project is visible only to its owner and the people it has been shared with. Belonging to a firm never grants access to a project on its own.
Access to production systems is restricted to the people who operate the Service, and security-relevant actions are logged.
If a data breach is likely to cause serious harm, we will notify the people affected and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner as the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme requires.

10. How long we keep it

Your account and content: for as long as you have an account. You can delete a conversation, a project or a document at any time.
When you delete your account: it is removed from AEC Assistant immediately, along with your conversations, your uploads and every project nobody else can reach. Copies held by our AI provider and file storage are removed within 30 days. Projects you have shared stay with the people you shared them with, and a team you are the only owner of must be handed over or deleted first. Deletion cannot be undone.
When a paid plan ends: the projects and documents that plan allowed are kept for at least 30 days from the end date, so you can renew or export them. They may be removed after that.
Billing records: seven years, as tax law requires.
The audit log and your marketing consent record: for as long as we need to show what happened and what you agreed to. If you withdraw consent or unsubscribe, we keep a record of that so we do not email you again.
Backups: overwritten in the normal course of operation.

11. Access, correction and deletion

You can see and change your name, email address, profession, jurisdiction and notes in Settings, and you can delete your account there. For anything else, or for a copy of the personal information we hold about you, write to support@aecassistant.com.au with "Privacy" in the subject. We will answer within 30 days and will not charge for a reasonable request. If we refuse a request we will tell you why and how to complain.

12. Complaints

If you think we have mishandled your information, write to us first and we will investigate and reply within 30 days. If you are not satisfied, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner atoaic.gov.au.

13. Children

The Service is for professionals and is not directed at anyone under 18. We do not knowingly collect information from children. If you believe a child has created an account, tell us and we will remove it.

14. Changes to this policy

We update this policy when our practices change. The date at the top says when it was last revised. For a change that materially affects how we use your information, we will tell you by email or in the Service before it takes effect.

15. Contact

Vove.AI Pty Ltd, ABN 66 682 176 414
PO Box 420, Dingley Village VIC 3172, Australia
support@aecassistant.com.au