Privacy Policy

Some listings offer a form that lets you send an enquiry directly to that business. When you use it, we collect the details you type in: your name, your email address, an optional phone number, and your message. We also record which page of the site you sent the enquiry from.

Your enquiry is passed to the one business you chose so it can reply to you. It is not sent to any other business, and it is not shared with other businesses as a shared lead.

“Your name, email address and any phone number you provide will be sent to this business so it can respond to your enquiry. Sending an enquiry does not subscribe you to marketing.”

That wording is shown beside the form, and the exact wording in force at the time is stored with your enquiry, so what you were told can be confirmed later.

Sending an enquiry does not subscribe you to marketing. We do not add you to a mailing list, and we do not sell or rent your details.

Enquiries are stored by Buy Local Toowoomba so they can be delivered, so an owner can respond, and so we can deal with problems such as a message that failed to send.

• The business you contacted, through the account of an authorised owner of that listing.
• Buy Local Toowoomba administrators, for support, security and to keep the service working.

Nobody else is given access to the content of your enquiry through the site.

To stop the form being used for spam or flooding, we record a one-way hashed value derived from the network origin of the request. It cannot be turned back into your network address, and your raw network address is not stored with the enquiry. The hash is only used to apply rate limits and to recognise repeat abuse.

We also store a hash of the content of the enquiry itself. This lets us recognise the same message being submitted twice — for example if you reload the page and send again — so the business is not sent a duplicate.

Our intended retention period for enquiry records is 24 months.

We want to be straightforward about the current state of this: the automated job that deletes or redacts enquiries once they pass 24 months has not been built yet. It remains an outstanding obligation on us, and until it is in place, removal of older enquiry records is handled manually on request. You can ask us to remove an enquiry you sent by contacting us using the details below.

We measure how listings are used so business owners can see whether being in the directory is doing anything for them. Two things are counted:

• Profile views — an anonymous count of how often a listing page was viewed.
• Contact actions — an anonymous count of clicks and taps on a listing’s contact details and links, such as a phone number, email link, website link, action button, booking link or social profile link.

These count taps on your contact details and links. They are not confirmed calls, emails, bookings or sales.

Both measurements are anonymous. They are not tied to your name, your email address or an account. A business owner sees aggregate numbers for their own listing only — ordinary views and clicks never tell a business who you are.

Where a browser tells us which site you arrived from, we may record that as part of this anonymous measurement. Only the origin of the referring site is kept; the specific page address and anything in its query string are discarded. New measurement we add will stay within this same privacy-minimised approach.

Information about a business in this directory may come from publicly available sources or from the business itself. Where a business claims and manages its own listing, the details shown are the details it has supplied.

We may also use the information described above for reasonable administration, security and operation of the service — for example investigating a fault, preventing misuse, or meeting a legal obligation.

If you have a question about this policy, or you want an enquiry you sent removed, contact us at [email protected].

Our Terms of Use explain the rules for using the directory.