TEKVA Limited (ABN 88 689 519 686) is committed to protecting your personal information in accordance with the Australian Privacy Act 1988 and the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs). This policy explains how we collect, use, and safeguard your data when you use our website, tools, donate, or interact with our services.
We collect information you provide directly: name, contact details, financial situation, employment status, and supporting documentation. When you use our tools (such as the Hardship Helper or Navigator), we collect the information you enter into those tools. When you donate, we collect your name, email, and payment details. We also collect technical data such as IP addresses for security and rate limiting purposes. Because of the nature of our work, what you tell us may include sensitive information about your health, family situation, or safety. We only collect it where it affects what support you need, and when you apply for support we ask for your consent to store it. Supporting you can also mean recording information about people in your household, such as a partner or dependants, where it's relevant to your situation. We record only what's needed and protect it the same way as your own information.
Your information is used to evaluate eligibility, provide personalised guidance, process donations, and maintain records required by law. We never sell your data or share it with third parties for marketing purposes.
Some of our tools (including the Hardship Helper) use artificial intelligence to generate personalised guidance. The information you enter into these tools is general and not personally identifying — for example, the type of hardship or an income range, not your name or contact details. This information is sent to Anthropic's Claude API, processed in the United States. Anthropic does not use API customer data to train AI models, and retains it only for a limited time for safety and service purposes. We do not store the information you enter into these tools. We also use AI tools in our own work — for example transcribing meetings and drafting notes and summaries. We only use paid services under agreements that stop your information being used to train AI models. We remove identifying details where practical, and people make every decision about your support.
TEKVA pays service providers directly on your behalf. This means we may share limited information (such as your name and account reference) with providers solely to process payments. Beyond this, your broader financial situation and personal circumstances are shared only with the services that help us operate (listed under Third-party services) and only as needed to support you — never sold, and never shared for anyone else's marketing.
Donations are processed by Stripe, a PCI-DSS certified payment processor. Stripe collects your payment card details directly and may use transaction data (including name, address, and card information) for fraud prevention and detection modelling. TEKVA does not store your card details. For more information, see Stripe's privacy policy at stripe.com/privacy.
We use the following services to operate our website and tools: Supabase (secure database hosting, located in Australia, where form submissions and case records are stored), Google Workspace (email, documents, and meeting transcription, processed in the United States), Vercel (hosting and deployment), Cloudflare Turnstile (bot protection, which processes anonymised technical signals such as IP address and browser fingerprint), Resend (transactional email), and Upstash Redis (rate limiting using IP addresses with automatic expiry). These services process data only as necessary to provide their function. We do not use advertising or behavioural tracking services.
Some of the services we use handle information outside Australia, mainly in the United States. We use paid business services under terms that require them to protect your information, and we take reasonable steps to make sure it's handled consistently with the Australian Privacy Principles. Your intake and case records are stored in our database in Sydney, Australia.
We use browser local storage to remember your theme preference (light or dark mode) and to save your progress in our interactive tools. This saving happens on your own device, not our servers; clearing your browser data removes it, which matters on a shared device. We use Vercel Web Analytics to count anonymous, aggregate usage events such as tool starts and completions. This data contains no personal information, no IP addresses, and no user identifiers. We do not use tracking cookies or behavioural advertising. Cloudflare Turnstile may set cookies necessary for bot protection when you submit a form.
All data is encrypted in transit (TLS) and at rest. Our case database is hosted in Sydney, Australia, and access is restricted to the team members supporting you. Our website is served over HTTPS.
When you submit a form, your submission (including your name, contact details, and the information you provide) is stored in our secure Supabase database, hosted in Australia, and in Google Workspace. Case and financial records are kept for seven years, as charity record-keeping and tax law require, then deleted or de-identified. Donation records are retained as required by Australian tax law. IP addresses used for rate limiting expire automatically; an IP address recorded with a form submission is retained alongside that submission. AI tool inputs are not stored after your session ends.
Under the Australian Privacy Act 1988, you can request access to, correction of, or deletion of information we no longer need to keep. Some records we must keep by law or for our own accountability, and we'll tell you which ones. To make a request, contact us at privacy@tekva.org.au. For donation records held by Stripe, we will submit a deletion request to Stripe on your behalf. You can also withdraw your consent at any time by contacting us. If you do, we'll stop; it may limit the support we can offer, and records we're required to keep will be kept. We will respond to all requests within 30 days.
We may update this policy from time to time. Material changes will be noted on this page with an updated date.
If you believe we have breached the Australian Privacy Principles, you may lodge a complaint with our Privacy Officer at privacy@tekva.org.au. If you are not satisfied with our response, you may contact the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) at oaic.gov.au.
For privacy concerns or questions, email privacy@tekva.org.au or write to: TEKVA Limited, L9, 151 Macquarie St, Sydney NSW 2000.