Privacy Policy

SOLEYPROOF PTY LTD (ABN 23 701 953 175) · admin@soleyproof.com.au · Interim v0.3, effective 25 October 2026

These interim terms will be replaced by solicitor-settled versions; you will be asked in the app to read and accept the new version.

Who we are

SoleyProof is a platform on which licensed tradespeople document and self-certify their own completed work. It is built and run in Australia by SOLEYPROOF PTY LTD.

What we collect

Account information: your name, email address and a password (stored only as a cryptographic hash — we cannot read it). If you enable two-factor authentication, its secret is stored encrypted.

Feedback you send from the app: your message, with your account name and email, kept for as long as your account exists.

Trade profile: your business name, ABN, trade licence number and the licence classes, status and conditions the government register reports for it, your business address and contact details, and any insurance certificate of currency you upload (with the expiry date read from it).

ACT licence list: to check an ACT trade licence we keep a daily copy of the ACT Government’s published licence list in Australia (Sydney). We keep only the fields we need to check a licence, and, for each word of a holder’s name, a keyed fingerprint (a one-way code made with a secret key we hold) rather than the name itself. Each day’s copy replaces the last, and nothing about you is sent to the list’s host. Copies stay in our backups only for as long as those are kept.

Coming-soon waitlist: if SoleyProof isn’t open yet in the state that issued your trade licence and you leave your email address so we can tell you when it opens, we keep only that email address, the state and the date you left it. No account is created. We use it only to email you once, when SoleyProof opens in that state, and then delete it. If that hasn’t happened within 400 days we delete it anyway, and you can ask us to remove it at any time (contact below). The email is recorded in our log of emails we send (your address, the subject and the date), which has no deletion date set yet, and a deleted waitlist entry stays in our backups for as long as those are kept. That email says who sent it and how to tell us you want no more like it. If you tell us that, we keep a one-way scrambled form of the address (not the address itself) with the reason, so that we don’t add it to the waitlist again or send it another waitlist email. It can be matched against an address someone already has, but it can’t be turned back into one.

Businesses that are not on SoleyProof: our owner may read a business’s licence on a state’s public licence register and record what the register showed (the licence number, its status and classes, the expiry date, the date it was read and, when read by hand, a copy of the register entry), linked to that business’s Google listing by Google’s identifier for it. We keep no name, address or other details from Google, and we do not write the licence holder’s name into that record (the copy shows whatever the register entry showed; it is seen only by our owner and is deleted when the check is taken down or replaced by a newer read). A business can ask us to take its check down at any time (contact below). It is no longer shown from that moment. We keep the rest of the record described above, a fingerprint of the deleted copy, and the date and reason it was taken down, so that we can show what was read and that the request was honoured. None of it is shown to the public. A copy can remain in our backups for as long as those backups are kept.

Job and customer information: job descriptions, site addresses, billing details you or your customer enter, quotes, invoices, variations and plans (plans can be redacted before sharing — redaction physically removes the text).

Evidence photographs: the photos you take or upload for checks, including their embedded capture time and, where present, GPS location. We store that location with the photo’s record, to work out how far from the job’s work address the photo was taken. SoleyProof does not show the coordinates on screen, in a certificate or on a shared page, only a statement such as that distance. The photo files themselves are kept exactly as uploaded, so a photo file you download from your records, or pass on to someone else, still carries any location your phone saved in it.

Records of platform activity: certificates you issue (which are kept for at least 10 years from issue — see Retention), check results, error logs (which record what failed, the page it failed on and, if you were signed in, your account’s id; they are not written with the content of your requests or messages, and links, email addresses, phone numbers and long tokens in the error text are masked before storing, though that is a safeguard for known shapes and not a guarantee; they are deleted after 400 days), logs of your questions to the in-app AI helpers (never your photos), and, when you choose a paid plan, a record of the plan terms shown to you at that point (the wording, its version and the date), kept so that what was offered can be shown later.

Job messages: messages exchanged on a job between its participants (for example a trade and an engineer invited onto the job) are stored as part of that job’s record and are visible to the job’s participants. They are private correspondence, not public content; no AI reads or writes them, and they are retained with the job’s record.

How we use it — including automated decision-making

We use your information to run the service: verifying your licence and ABN against the official government registers, running checks, issuing your certificates, and showing your public profile and verify pages.

The check of your work is undertaken by artificial intelligence. When you run a check, an AI model examines your photographs and your own declared answers against building-code provisions and proposes an outcome for each provision. You review and confirm before anything is certified — nothing is certified automatically, and the AI never decides whether your licence is valid (only the government register’s own data does that). AI also reads dates off documents you upload (such as an insurance certificate’s expiry); you can correct anything it reads. Certificates state on their face that the check is an AI check, a decision-support tool only.

SoleyProof uses an AI assistant called Georgia, and she always says she is an AI. She helps our staff through our staff help tool and prepares draft replies to emails sent to our support address. Where the app offers a Help button, that is her too. A person reads each draft reply to a support email before it is sent. The one exception is automatic replies to routine questions: they go out only while we have them switched on, and each is marked as written by our AI assistant and sent without a person reading it first. When a support email has files attached, she can also read the text files among them (plain text, CSV, HTML, Markdown, calendar files and emails sent as files; never pictures, PDFs or Word files) and add a short note about them to the support request, for our support team only. She does this only while we have it switched on. She runs on Anthropic’s Claude AI models through Amazon Bedrock in Australia, as set out under “Who we share with”. The questions put to the assistant, its answers and its draft replies are kept in logs for 400 days and then deleted (see Retention), and none of those logs holds a photograph. She does not decide your licence, a check result or a certificate: those stay with the register, your checks and you. You can always reach a person at /support or admin@soleyproof.com.au.

We do not score you, or rate your risk, from your records, and we do not look through your records for patterns to report to regulators, insurers or anyone else. Separately, the law, a written notice from a regulator or an order of a court can require us to hand over records we hold.

Ratings and reviews

Star ratings are different, because they come from other people and not from your records. Customers can review the trade they hired, with stars and words, and a published review adds to the average of stars shown on that trade’s public profile. Trades can rate a customer they have worked with on communication, payment and site access, with stars only and no words. Once a customer has been rated a minimum number of times, trades see one general star average for that customer next to that customer’s enquiry. The average is shown without a count, without the separate scores for communication, payment and site access, and without the name of the trade that gave a rating. You can ask us about the ratings we hold about you, as set out under Your choices.

Who sees what

Your public verify page shows the certificate’s sections and results, your business identity, and honest statements about the evidence. When a certificate is reissued or withdrawn it also shows the reason the issuing trade gave, so please keep your customer’s name and address out of any reason you write. SoleyProof does not put your customer’s name or address on it, and it shows no raw photo locations. Your customers see the jobs they are part of. If you are a customer and you leave a review of a trade, your rating, your words, any photos you add and your full name, as it is on your account, are shown on that trade’s public profile, which anyone can open without an account. Anyone you give a certificate code or share link to can see what that code or link is for.

The private notes you write on a job are shown to you and to any office manager acting for you, and not to customers or anyone else on the job. They are included in the records you can assemble for the job, and an authorised person at SoleyProof can include them in a job export assembled for an audit, an insurer or a court.

Who we share with

Government registers, when we look up a licence, an ABN, a white card or a permit — we send the number you gave us. The AI that reads your check photographs is Claude, made by Anthropic and run for us by Amazon Web Services on Amazon Bedrock in Sydney, through Amazon’s Australian setting, which processes each request in Sydney or Melbourne; AWS states that the model provider has no access to what is sent, and that it is not used to train models. Questions our staff type into our staff help tool, which may include a customer’s details, are sent to the same AI (Amazon Bedrock in Sydney), and the log of them is kept for 400 days. Our email is sent through Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon Web Services) in Sydney, which sends messages such as your certificates, so it receives each message and the address it goes to.

Our servers, our database and our backups are in Sydney, with DigitalOcean. DigitalOcean encrypts our database at rest. We do not yet encrypt our nightly backup files ourselves before storing them. DigitalOcean’s own documentation says its weekly whole-server backups, which we also keep, are not encrypted at rest; they are stored in the same Sydney data centre as the server and are not accessible from outside it.

Some services we use are run by companies based overseas, and what we send them may be handled outside Australia. Payments are handled by Stripe (Stripe, LLC, in the United States, which has no Australia-only option): we send it the email address on your account and an internal reference, and we do not send your name. Card details are entered on Stripe’s own payment page, not ours, and we do not store them. Anything you type on Stripe’s own pages is held by Stripe. The map on the Find a trade directory is provided by Google, which may handle that information outside Australia, including in the United States. When the Find a trade directory opens on a wider screen, such as a computer or a tablet held sideways, or you choose its Map view on a narrower one such as a phone, your browser loads Google Maps from Google, which receives your internet address (IP address), your browser details and the area the map shows (which can be the place you searched for). The suburb and address suggestions in the location box come from Geoscape, our geocoding provider: what you type there goes to our own server, which passes it to Geoscape. Its gateway answers from Sydney, but Geoscape’s own privacy policy says the company that runs the gateway handles information overseas, so what you type there may be handled outside Australia. We do not currently send text messages. Invitations go by email, and security notices go by email (and as a phone notification, if you turn notifications on). If you turn on notifications, a short notice naming the event (never customer details or certificate contents) passes through the push service run by your browser or phone’s maker (such as Google, Apple or Mozilla). Our public website (not the app itself) is delivered through Cloudflare, which handles each visitor’s request to it. Email sent to our support address is held in our Microsoft 365 mailbox; Microsoft is a US company, and our account’s settings show it stores that mailbox at rest in Australia.

Support email: email sent to our support address is read by Georgia, our AI assistant, about every 15 minutes. She reads the message, its subject and its sender’s address, sorts the message and writes a draft reply. When a support email has files attached, she can also read the text files among them (plain text, CSV, HTML, Markdown, calendar files and emails sent as files; never pictures, PDFs or Word files) and add a short note about them to the support request, for our support team only. She does this only while we have it switched on. A person reads each draft reply to a support email before it is sent. The one exception is automatic replies to routine questions: they go out only while we have them switched on, and each is marked as written by our AI assistant and sent without a person reading it first. She runs on Amazon Bedrock in Australia, and a log of what she was asked and answered is kept for 400 days.

When an address is placed on a map, or you type in the Find a trade location box, our geocoding provider, Geoscape, receives that address or what you typed. Its gateway answers from Sydney, but Geoscape’s own privacy policy says the company that runs the gateway handles information overseas, so that address or what you typed may be handled outside Australia. When you choose a password, we check it against the Have I Been Pwned list of passwords leaked in other websites’ breaches by sending only the first five characters of a one-way scrambled form of it — never the password itself. We do not guess a visitor’s location from their internet address: to find trades nearby, a visitor types a suburb or postcode.

Our abuse limits keep a one-way scrambled form of an address rather than the address itself; a weekly clean-up removes each one from our live database within about two weeks of that address’s last request. Our web server’s request log keeps a shortened address (the last part removed), to investigate a security incident; it has no fixed deletion date, because the log file is replaced by a new one only when it reaches a set size, and a replaced file is then deleted 90 days later (or sooner, once more than 20 replaced files have built up), so on a quiet site an entry can be kept for more than 90 days, and for more than 400 days. Copies of both can remain in our backups for as long as those backups are kept. We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for advertising.

Who handles your information, and where

These are the services that receive personal information from us, or from your browser when you use SoleyProof, what each one receives, and where it is handled.

• DigitalOcean (a US company). Receives: Everything the app stores: accounts, jobs, records, evidence photos, our database and our nightly backups. Where: Sydney, Australia. (Australia)
• Amazon Web Services (a US company), on Amazon Bedrock, running Claude, made by Anthropic. Receives: What our AI helpers read: check photographs and answers, support questions, email sent to our support address (read about every 15 minutes, to sort it and draft a reply), and questions our staff type into our staff help tool. Where: Australia: Amazon's Australian setting processes each request in Sydney or Melbourne. (Australia)
• Amazon Web Services, Amazon Simple Email Service. Receives: Each email we send, the address it goes to, and whether it was delivered. Where: Sydney, Australia. (Australia)
• Australian government registers (NSW Government, the Queensland Building and Construction Commission, the Australian Business Register and training.gov.au). Receives: The licence, ABN, qualification or permit number you gave us. Where: Australian government services; some are delivered through a network run by an overseas company (Cloudflare or Amazon CloudFront), which carries the request. (Australia and overseas)
• NSW Government map services (heritage and hazard maps). Receives: The map position of a job's site address in NSW. Where: Australia. (Australia)
• Geoscape Australia. Receives: An address, to place it on a map, and what you type in the Find a trade directory's location box (it reaches Geoscape through our own server). Where: Its gateway answers from Sydney; Geoscape's own privacy policy says the company that runs that gateway (Apigee) handles information overseas. (Australia and overseas)
• Stripe. Receives: The email address on your account and an internal reference, not your name (card details are entered on Stripe's own page, not ours, and we do not store them; anything you type there Stripe holds). Where: Overseas: Stripe, LLC, in the United States, which has no Australia-only option. (Overseas)
• Google (Google Maps). Receives: When the Find a trade directory loads its map: your internet address, browser details and the area the map shows (which can be the place you searched for). Where: Overseas, including the United States. (Overseas)
• Your browser or phone maker's notification service (such as Google, Apple, Mozilla or Microsoft). Receives: If you turn on notifications: a short notice, encrypted so only your device can read it, and your device's notification address. Where: Overseas. (Overseas)
• Cloudflare. Receives: Each visit to our public website (not the app itself): the visitor's internet address and request. Where: Overseas: Cloudflare's own privacy policy says it stores information mainly in the United States and the European Economic Area. (Overseas)
• Microsoft 365 (Microsoft is a US company). Receives: Email sent to our support address (our AI assistant reads it about every 15 minutes: see Amazon Web Services above). Where: Stored in Australia, as our account's settings show. (Australia)

Retention

Issued certificates are professional records that we keep for at least 10 years from issue, so deactivating your account does not delete certificates you have issued, and a certificate can never be edited after issue — only corrected by reissue or withdrawn, with the history visible. The supporting photos are kept with the record for at least 10 years from issue; no deletion after that has been built, so today they stay with the record. You can export your certificates, each as a structured record with the supporting photos attached to it, in one file at any time, free.

Logs: the error log, the logs of questions to and answers from our AI helpers and support assistant, the log of our staff help tool, and the mailbox-triage log are deleted after 400 days, by a clean-up that runs weekly. Rate-limit counters are deleted by the same weekly clean-up once 7 days have passed since an address’s last request, so within about two weeks. The web server’s request log has no fixed deletion date: its files are replaced by size and deleted 90 days after being replaced, as described above, so on a quiet site an entry can last more than 400 days. Our other logs (the log of staff actions, the log of emails we send, security events, support requests and billing events) have no deletion date set yet.

Security and breaches

Passwords are hashed, two-factor secrets are encrypted, register responses are filtered of identifying personal fields the moment they arrive, and the database accepts connections only from our own server. If a data breach ever puts your information at risk, we will tell you promptly and plainly what happened and what we are doing about it.

Your choices

You can read and correct your profile at any time, export your records, ask us about any information we hold about you, and deactivate your account (which removes you from public search while preserving issued records as described above). Contact: admin@soleyproof.com.au.

Cookies and device storage

We use sign-in session cookies and on-device storage for conveniences such as resuming an in-progress check. No advertising trackers.

This policy is governed by the law of New South Wales.