Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

Local Home Help is an independent Australian aged-care information and provider-discovery service. This policy explains how Local Home Help collects, uses, stores, discloses and removes personal information. We design our information-handling practices around the Australian Privacy Principles and other applicable Australian privacy requirements.

2. The information we may collect

• Account and contact information such as name, email address and phone number
• Information about who needs care and the user’s relationship to that person
• Aged-care funding status, program, care level or classification information
• Services needed, management preferences, urgency, postcode and provider preferences
• Health, disability, medication, safety, family or other sensitive information a person chooses to tell Liz
• Liz conversation text and structured information derived from it while the conversation is active
• Providers, articles, questions or tools deliberately saved to My Home Care
• Provider enquiry contact details, message content, consent and delivery status
• Provider representative, claim and account information
• Technical and usage information such as session identifiers, page activity, provider views, saves and other product interactions
• Approximate location information such as city, region or postcode inferred from the public IP address by our hosting provider, where available; this is treated as approximate rather than precise location

3. Sensitive information and Liz

Aged-care conversations can include health and other sensitive information. Liz only needs information that is relevant to the question or care decision. Before starting Liz, we provide a collection notice and ask the user to consent to Local Home Help processing the care and health information they choose to share for guidance, provider matching and operation of the service.

• Do not send passwords, PINs, card security codes, authentication codes or information Liz does not need
• You can use public Local Home Help content and the provider directory without using Liz
• Where possible, describe the situation without unnecessary names, account numbers or identifying detail

4. How Liz uses artificial intelligence

Liz is an artificial-intelligence system, not a person. Local Home Help uses AI services to help interpret some questions and generate some responses. Information sent to Liz may therefore be processed by Local Home Help’s AI service provider as part of producing the response. Local Home Help does not use Liz as a mechanism to build a permanent personal health profile or to train its own general-purpose model on identifiable consumer conversations.

• AI responses can be wrong or incomplete
• Liz does not make government eligibility, funding or clinical decisions
• Important medical, legal, financial, safety or eligibility decisions should be checked with an appropriate professional or official source
• Local Home Help uses business/API AI services rather than the consumer ChatGPT product for Liz

5. Why we collect and use information

• Answer questions and provide aged-care guidance
• Maintain the context of an active Liz conversation
• Identify providers that appear relevant to the circumstances described
• Allow a person to compare, save or contact providers
• Operate My Home Care and account features
• Respond to support, privacy and provider enquiries
• Improve safety, reliability and usability
• Create de-identified or aggregated analytics about provider discovery, consumer topics and market demand, including broad geographic patterns
• Protect the service from fraud, misuse and security threats

6. Provider matching and automated processing

Liz and Local Home Help’s matching engine use information such as services, funding, location, urgency and preferences to identify relevant provider options. The matching system is a decision-support tool. It does not decide a person’s government eligibility, funding entitlement, clinical suitability or whether a provider must accept them. Providers can pay for clearly labelled visibility, if offered, but cannot pay to influence personalised matching or organic provider ranking.

7. When information is shared with providers

Local Home Help does not give providers access to a consumer’s Liz conversation merely because that provider appears in results. If a consumer chooses to contact a provider through Local Home Help, the consumer sees the proposed message and approves the information before it is sent. The selected provider then receives the approved message and contact details and becomes responsible for its own handling of that copy.

8. Our retention approach

Local Home Help is designed around data minimisation: keep what is needed to provide the service or demonstrate legitimate platform value, and remove personal conversation detail when it is no longer needed.

Deletion from active application data may not immediately remove information from short-lived encrypted infrastructure backups. Backup copies are not used for ordinary product access and expire through the relevant provider’s normal backup cycle. We may also retain information where Australian law or a court or tribunal order requires it.

• Liz conversation text and derived person context: removed with the temporary Liz journey after 30 days without activity
• Temporary journey, matching and shortlist data: removed after 30 days without activity unless the information is deliberately saved in a separate account feature
• My Home Care saved providers, care profiles and deliberately saved items: retained until the user removes them or closes the account
• Provider enquiry message body: removed from Local Home Help active data after 30 days
• Provider enquiry contact details: removed from Local Home Help active data after 90 days; minimal consent and transaction metadata may be retained longer where reasonably required
• Row-level provider-demand events: aggregated for provider-value reporting and then removed after 30 days
• Analytics identity and journey links: severed after 30 days so useful product metrics can remain without an ongoing link to the individual
• Liz QA material: raw conversation-linked review material expires with the underlying conversation; a de-identified regression example may be retained where it has been deliberately sanitised
• Provider account, claim and listing information: retained while needed to operate the provider relationship, meet legal obligations or maintain an appropriate business audit record

9. De-identified and aggregated information

Local Home Help may retain information that has been genuinely de-identified or aggregated so it is no longer about an identifiable or reasonably identifiable person. This can include counts of provider presentations, profile views, saves, demand signals and enquiries, as well as aggregated consumer topics and approximate geographic demand patterns. The purpose is to measure whether Local Home Help creates value and to improve the service without retaining a permanent consumer conversation history.

10. Service providers and overseas processing

Local Home Help uses specialist technology providers to operate the service. Current core providers include Supabase for database and authentication services, Vercel for application hosting, OpenAI for AI processing used by Liz, and Resend for email delivery.

Where personal information is disclosed to an overseas recipient, Local Home Help takes reasonable steps appropriate to the circumstances to assess and manage that processing.

• Local Home Help’s current Supabase project is hosted in the Singapore region
• Other service providers and their subprocessors may process information in the United States and other countries where they operate
• The locations used by technology providers can change over time as their infrastructure and subprocessors change

11. Security

Local Home Help uses technical and organisational controls intended to protect personal information from misuse, loss and unauthorised access, modification or disclosure. No internet service can guarantee absolute security, so we also reduce risk by limiting how long personal conversation data is kept.

12. Access, correction and deletion requests

You can ask what personal information Local Home Help holds about you, request correction of inaccurate information or ask for deletion where applicable by contacting hello@localhomehelp.com.au. We may need to verify your identity before acting on a request. Information saved in My Home Care can also be removed through the relevant product controls where available.

13. Privacy complaints

Privacy questions or complaints can be sent to hello@localhomehelp.com.au. We will acknowledge and investigate the issue and aim to respond within a reasonable period. If you are not satisfied with our response and the Privacy Act applies, you may be able to complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.

14. Data breaches

If a data breach occurs, Local Home Help will assess, contain and respond to it. Where the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme or another applicable law requires notification, we will notify affected individuals and the relevant regulator as required.

15. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as the service, technology or law changes. The current version and review date will be published on this page.