Privacy policy

Read this first. This policy was written from the primary sources, being the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Spam Act 2003 (Cth), and from a technical audit of our own systems carried out on 15 August 2026. It has not been reviewed by a lawyer. An Australian privacy lawyer should review it before anyone relies on it, including us.

Effective from 15 August 2026. We may update this policy. When we do, we will change the date at the top and publish the new version on this page.

Who this covers

Site Inspections Pty Ltd. We are a building inspection company. Our office is in Melbourne and we inspect across Australia.

This policy covers our website at siteinspections.com.au, the enquiry form on it, our phone and email contact, our inspections, our reports, and our photographs.

It does not cover our shop at siteinspections.shop. That is a separate site run on Shopify. When you click Shop in our menu you leave this website, and Shopify’s own privacy policy applies to what happens there.

This policy describes what we do as at the date at the top. If you want to know whether we do something it does not mention, ask us. Our details are at the end.

What we collect

When you enquire. Our form asks for your name, phone number and email address, your situation (buying, building, something wrong with your home, or in a dispute), the address of the property, the property type, the reports you need, an optional deadline, and anything you write in the comments box.

The property address deserves its own sentence. It is the most identifying thing we collect. Put together with your name and the reason you contacted us, it describes your home and often a problem with it. This policy names the systems that hold it and the people we give it to.

Collected automatically, with every form submission. Your IP address, your browser and device details, the page you submitted from, and a risk score from Google reCAPTCHA. All four are stored with your enquiry.

When we inspect. The property address, our findings, and photographs of the property inside and out. Often several hundred photographs on one job.

Where our client is not the person living there, such as a buyer before settlement or a solicitor, what we hold can include details of owners, occupiers, tenants, builders and agents, usually given to us by our client rather than by those people themselves.

When you deal with us in other ways. Whatever you give us by phone or email. If you comment on our blog, your name, email address, IP address and the comment itself.

We do not ask for sensitive information such as health information. If an access or habitability issue means you have to tell us something of that kind, tell us only what the inspection needs.

You cannot pay through this website. There is no payment page on it. We invoice for our work and we keep the invoicing and payment records a business has to keep.

What happens before you press submit

Two things collect information from you the moment you open a page here, whether or not you ever contact us.

• Google reCAPTCHA runs on every page of this site. It is bot protection. It watches how you move around and interact with the page, and gives each form submission a score, which we store with your enquiry. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
• Google address autocomplete. As you type the property address into our form, what you have typed so far is sent to Google in real time so it can suggest matches. If you start typing your address and then close the page, Google has still received what you typed. If you would rather that did not happen, phone or email us instead of using the form.

Cookies and analytics

There is no cookie banner on this site. The tools below run by default. You can limit them in your browser settings, and Google publishes an opt-out add-on for Google Analytics.

• Google Analytics 4, loaded through Google Tag Manager, records the pages you view and three actions: clicking our phone number, clicking our email address, and completing the contact form. It receives your IP address, an ID number saved in a cookie which is not your name, and page, device and browser details. It does not receive what you typed into the form.
• Cloudflare sits in front of this website. Every request passes through it. It sets a short-lived cookie, about 30 minutes, used to tell people apart from bots.
• Wordfence, our security plugin, records the IP addresses of login attempts and of requests it blocks, and shares attack information with its own security network.
• Akismet checks blog comments and form submissions for spam. It receives the details submitted and the content of the message.
• Vimeo hosts the video on our home page. On a desktop browser, if you scroll down to it, your browser connects to Vimeo. On the paths we have checked, we load it with Vimeo’s Do Not Track setting turned on.

Two automated checks can stop your message reaching us

The reCAPTCHA score and the Akismet spam check can each cause a form submission to be rejected or filed as spam. When that happens nobody here sees it. If you send us something and do not hear back, phone us on 1300 906 980.

Where we keep it

• Our website database, on our hosting with WP Engine. Every form submission is stored there.
• Our email, on Google Workspace. Every form submission is also emailed to our office inbox in full, property address included.
• Our inspection software, which we write reports in. It holds client details, property addresses, findings and inspection photographs.
• Our photograph archive, which the business keeps itself.

Who else sees it

• People you ask us to deal with, such as your solicitor, conveyancer, broker, builder or agent, when you ask us to send them your report or to speak to them for you.
• Courts, tribunals and regulators, when a subpoena, summons, order or law requires it.
• The companies that run our systems, being the ones named in this policy: Google, WP Engine, Cloudflare, our inspection software, Automattic (Akismet), Defiant (Wordfence) and Vimeo.

We give those companies information only so they can supply their service to us. Each of them also operates under its own privacy policy, which governs what it does with the information. That part is not ours to control, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

We do not sell or trade personal information, and we do not disclose it in return for payment.

Which of them are overseas

Most of them.

• United States. Google LLC, Cloudflare, Inc., Automattic Inc. (Akismet), Defiant, Inc. (Wordfence) and Vimeo.com, Inc.
• United States. Our inspection software, which holds our reports and inspection photographs. Its provider operates its service in the United States.
• Not confirmed, and we will not guess. WP Engine, Inc., which hosts this website, is a United States company, and its platform staff can reach our website systems. We have not confirmed which country the servers holding our website database are in, so we are not naming one. The same applies to our email: it runs on Google Workspace, and we have not confirmed which country the mailboxes sit in.

Plainly, then: if you enquire with us, your details, including your property address, pass through systems run by companies based outside Australia.

What we use it for

• answering your enquiry and quoting the work
• scheduling and carrying out the inspection
• writing your report and sending it to you, and to anyone you ask us to send it to
• invoicing you and keeping business records
• keeping the file on a completed job, including the report and the photographs, in case it is needed later, for example if our work is questioned or if you need it for a dispute
• running and securing this website
• filtering spam on our forms and our blog

Our enquiry form says: “We use your details to answer this enquiry and nothing else.” That means we never use your enquiry for marketing and never hand it to anyone beyond the systems named in this policy. The records we keep are the ones described above.

Your report, and where it goes

Your report is written for you. Clients routinely send their report on to builders, insurers, lawyers, regulators and tribunals. Once we have delivered it to you, sending it on is your decision.

Apart from the service providers named above, which hold our systems, we disclose a report to someone else only when you ask us to, or when the law requires it, such as a subpoena or an order of a court or tribunal.

Photographs

We photograph the properties we inspect. It is how a defect is proved.

Photographs taken for your report are used for your report.

We also publish photographs, in articles, guides and social media posts about building defects. We publish a photograph only where it does not identify a person or a property, or where the client has agreed. This is how we make sure of that.

• Every file we prepare for publication is run through our own script. It removes all the metadata the camera wrote into the file, including the GPS coordinates, the camera make and model, and the timestamp. It then re-opens the saved file and checks the metadata has actually gone, rather than assuming it.
• The file is renamed, so the filename carries nothing either.
• A person then looks at every image, one at a time, for the things software cannot see: faces, and faces reflected in glass or tiles, street numbers, letterboxes, signage, number plates, readable documents, and landscaping or streetscape distinctive enough to identify the address. Anything on that list is blurred, or the photograph is not used.

That last step is a person, not software. Our script does not detect faces or street numbers, and it does not claim to.

Where a published photograph is not of the property an article is about, the caption says so, so that nobody wrongly connects a house to a story.

If a photograph of your property has been published and you want it taken down, tell us and we will deal with it straight away.

How long we keep it

Indefinitely. We do not delete anything on a schedule.

There is no automatic deletion set up anywhere in our systems. Enquiries sent to us in 2024 are still in the website database today, with the IP address they were sent from. Reports and photographs are kept for as long as the business holds them.

The reason is that building problems surface years after the work is done. A report written years ago can be the document that settles an argument now, and the photographs behind it are the evidence.

We are telling you this plainly rather than saying that we destroy information once it is no longer needed. That would not be true of us.

You can ask us to delete what we hold about you. If you do, we will read the request, tell you what we hold, and delete what we are able to delete. We will tell you what we are keeping and why. Where we have carried out an inspection, we will usually keep the report and its photographs, because our work can be questioned years later and that file is our answer. We are not going to promise you a deletion we cannot carry out.

Email we send you

When you enquire, we email you about your enquiry and your job. That is the extent of it. We do not run a newsletter or a mailing list, and we do not add you to one.

If we ever send marketing email, the Spam Act 2003 (Cth) applies to it, and so will this: every message will say it is from Site Inspections Pty Ltd, will carry working contact details, and will have an unsubscribe that works, which we will action within five working days. We will only send it to people who have asked for it.

Security

What is in place: this website sits behind Cloudflare; a security plugin monitors and blocks attacks and login attempts; form submissions are screened; the site is served over HTTPS; nobody can sign themselves up for an account on it; and photographs go through the process described above before they are published.

We do not promise that security incidents are impossible. Nobody honestly can.

If we find out that personal information we hold has been exposed, we will tell the people whose information it is, and tell them what we know.

Asking for a copy, a correction, or deletion

You can ask us for a copy of what we hold about you, and ask us to correct anything that is wrong, out of date or incomplete. Email [email protected] with “Privacy request” in the subject line, or write to us at the address below.

We aim to answer within 30 days. There is no charge for asking. If putting the information together involves real cost, a very large number of photographs for instance, any charge will cover that cost and nothing more, and we will tell you the figure before you incur it.

There are things we may not hand over: material that would expose someone else’s private information, and material that relates to a legal dispute between us and the person asking. If we say no, we will tell you why, in writing.

One boundary is worth stating. A professional finding honestly reached is not inaccurate merely because someone disagrees with it, and we will not rewrite one. If we decline a correction you have asked for, you can ask us to attach a statement of your disagreement to the record, and we will.

Complaints

If you think we have mishandled your information, email [email protected] with “Privacy complaint” in the subject line. Tell us what happened and what you want done about it. We will acknowledge it within 7 days and give you a written answer, and we aim to do that within 30 days.

You can also complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, at oaic.gov.au or on 1300 363 992.

There is one thing you should know before you do, and we would rather tell you than have you find it out. The Australian Privacy Principles in the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) bind businesses that Act calls APP entities. Section 6D(1) says a business is a small business if “its annual turnover for the previous financial year is $3,000,000 or less”, and small business operators are generally outside that class. Whether we sit inside or outside it is a legal question, and our own privacy policy is not the right place for us to answer it. It affects what the Commissioner is able to do with a complaint about us. That is for the Commissioner to work out. We are not going to tell you that you have a right here, and we are not going to tell you that you do not.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy. When we do, the date at the top changes and the new version goes on this page, so the date tells you which version applied when. If you would like a copy in another form, such as a PDF, ask us and we will send you one.

Contact us

Site Inspections Pty Ltd
Email: [email protected]
Phone: 1300 906 980
Post: 288/585 Little Collins Street, Melbourne VIC 3000