Privacy
What we collect, and what we do with it.
This page is written to be read. It covers everything this website collects about you. If something here is unclear, email porchlight@gh-v.com and we'll answer in plain words.
Who we are
Porchlight is a small Australian business that builds websites for tradespeople and runs their Google advertising. We are a small business operator under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth). We follow the Australian Privacy Principles anyway, and this page is written against them.
The search box on the home page
Typing a business name and a suburb into the search box opens Google in a new tab. We don't see what you searched for; Google does, under Google's own privacy policy. Nothing you type there is sent to us.
The suburb field is filled in for you from your approximate location. That location comes from the network address your connection arrives on, as read by the content network in front of our servers; it is a city-level guess, we don't ask your browser for your location, and we don't keep it.
The question form
When you ask a question through the form on the home page we collect your name, your email address, the question you typed, and the time you sent it. We use them to answer you, and for nothing else. The message is stored on our systems and emailed to us.
We keep a question for as long as we're talking to you and for twelve months after, so a follow-up has its context, and then we delete it. Ask sooner and we delete it sooner.
Starting a site at /start
The intake asks about your business: what you do, what it's called, where you work, a mobile number for the call button on your site, and the details that go on the site itself, such as testimonials and hours. If you use "Find my business", the name you type is sent to the Australian Business Register's public lookup and the matches come back to you; a match you pick is marked as coming from the register until you confirm it.
Your answers build a private draft of your site. An unpaid draft, and every answer behind it, is deleted 24 hours after it was started. If you go on to pay, the answers become your client record and stay for the life of the engagement.
Paying
Payments are taken on a page run by Stripe. Your card or bank details are entered there and handled by Stripe under Stripe's privacy policy; we never see the number. Stripe tells us that a payment succeeded, the amount, and a reference we use to match it to your draft.
Who sees it
Porchlight does — the person running the business, and nobody else on our side. We do not sell, rent, or trade what you give us with anyone, and we never will; keeping enquiry data first-party is part of what makes us a small business operator under the Act.
Where it is stored, and who else touches it
- Amazon Web Services, Sydney. Our systems run in AWS's Sydney region. Your enquiry, your intake answers and your draft are stored there, and the email that tells us you've written is sent from there.
- Google. Once you're a client, your advertising runs on Google Ads, and Google receives what it needs to run and measure it. Before then, Google only sees a search you choose to run from the home page, and the request this page makes to load its typefaces from Google Fonts — which, like any web request, shows Google the network address the page was loaded from.
- Stripe. Only when you pay, as above.
That is the complete list. There are no advertising trackers, analytics scripts or cookies on this website.
Google and Stripe are global companies and may process what they receive outside Australia, under their own policies linked above. Everything we hold ourselves stays in Sydney.
Getting a copy, or getting rid of it
Email porchlight@gh-v.com from the address you used and say what you want: a copy of what we hold about you, a correction, or deletion. We'll do it within 30 days and tell you when it's done. Deleting an unpaid draft happens on its own within 24 hours; deleting a client record ends the engagement, and we'll say so before we do it.
If something goes wrong
If you think we've handled your information badly, tell us first and we'll fix it. If you're not satisfied, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.
Changes
If this page changes, the change is dated here. Last changed 2 September 2026.