Privacy Policy

Karua Pty Ltd (ABN 69 693 206 629) runs karua.com.au. This policy explains what personal information we collect, why, who we share it with, and the choices you have. Questions, requests or complaints: info@karua.com.au. How Karua works, because it decides who holds your information. Karua arranges home-services jobs as your agent. When a contractor accepts your job, your contract for the work is with that contractor, a separate business with its own ABN and licence. So some of your information is held by Karua, and some is passed to the contractor who does your job. This policy covers what Karua does. Once a contractor has your details, they hold them as your contractor and are responsible for them too. Our agreement with them limits what they may do with them (section 4). 1. WHAT WE COLLECT, AND WHY If you book a job - Name, email and phone: to identify you, confirm your booking and contact you about the job. - Property address and its map coordinates, and your device's location if you tap "use my location": to check we service the area, send the contractor to the right place, and confirm they arrived. - On-site contact name and phone: so the contractor can reach whoever is meeting them, if that is not you. - Access notes, which may include gate codes or where a key is kept: so the contractor can get in. Shared only with the contractor who accepts the job. - Your description of the job and your answers to our questions, and if you speak instead of typing, the text of what you said: to work out what the job is and price it. - Photographs of your property, including inside it: see section 2. - Your appointment of Karua as your agent: when you book, you tick a box appointing Karua to arrange the job for you. We record the wording you were shown, its version, the time, and that you ticked it. - Payment details: handled by Stripe. Karua never sees or stores your card number, only a Stripe reference. - Anything you tell us in a dispute or a no-show report: to resolve it fairly. - Your rating and review after the job: to improve the service. We publish your review as a testimonial only if you tick the box. If you get an estimate without an account Before we show your estimate, we ask for your email or mobile. If you give an email, we send you your estimate and a link back to it. We use your email or mobile to contact you about that estimate, for example if we have a question or the price changes. We do not use it for marketing unless you separately agree. If you are a tenant reporting a problem If your property manager gives you a Karua reporting link, we collect your name, contact details, your description of the problem and any photos you add. We pass them to your property manager, who is our customer, and use them only to record and act on the report. You are not charged and you are not asked to agree to anything. If you would rather not use the link, contact your property manager directly. If you are a contractor We collect your name and the identity details that Stripe, our payments provider, checks for us; your business name, address, ABN and GST status; your licence, insurance and other credential documents; and your payout details. Payouts go through Stripe, or, if you give us your bank account name, BSB and account number instead, we hold those. We also collect your availability, your location when you start and finish each job or report a no-show, your work timestamps, photos you take on site, and a record of every job offered to you and whether you accepted or declined. We compile a vetting record about you (section 10). If we invite you to join as a contractor We look for trade businesses in the areas we serve, using public sources such as business listings, licence registers and business websites. We may collect your business name, contact name, business email and phone, licence number and ABN where they are published, and the page we found them on. A person at Karua approves every first email before it is sent. If you reply that you want to join, or ask for the sign-up link, we send you the link automatically. Any other reply is answered by a person. Every email says who it is from and how to stop further emails. If you reply, we keep your reply to deal with it. If you use the help assistant The help assistant on our site answers questions about Karua. We store your conversation with it, including when you are not signed in, so we can answer you and improve our answers. Please do not type payment details or other sensitive information into it. Everyone We keep records of the notifications and emails we send you. If you turn on browser notifications, we store the address your browser gives us to deliver them. Our site stores some information in your browser, such as an unfinished job description, so you do not lose it. If you arrive from an ad or a link that names a campaign, we note the campaign and the website that sent you on your job, so we can see which advertising works. We do not share it with any ad network. We do not use advertising or analytics trackers. 2. PHOTOGRAPHS OF YOUR PROPERTY Photographs taken inside your home are the most sensitive thing we hold. They can show your belongings, the layout of your home and how to get in. We use them only for your job and never as marketing. Photographs are taken at three points: 1. By you, when you describe the job, if you choose to add photos. 2. By the contractor before starting, to record the condition of the area. 3. By the contractor at completion, to evidence the work. What we do with them. We use them to scope and price your job, to give the contractor the context to do it, to evidence what was done, and to resolve a dispute if one arises. Who sees them. Karua staff; an AI service, for the photos you upload when describing the job (section 3); and the contractors we offer the job to. The photos you upload are shown when we offer the job, before anyone accepts, so a contractor who declines may have seen them. This lets them judge the job before committing. Photos the contractor takes on site are not shown to anyone else we later offer the job to. How they are stored. Photos are stored with our platform provider at long, unlisted web addresses that cannot practically be guessed. Karua only shows them inside the app to the people listed above. What we ask of contractors. Photograph the work area and what is relevant to the job. Do not photograph people, documents, valuables or unrelated rooms. Your control. You do not have to upload photos, though we may then ask more questions or need a visit to confirm the price. If you would prefer the contractor did not photograph a particular area, tell us or tell them. You can ask us to delete photos from a completed job (section 11). We never publish a photograph of your property without asking you. 3. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND AUTOMATED DECISIONS What we use AI for. We send information to artificial intelligence (AI) services to: - work out what your job is, what it involves and what to ask you, from your description, your answers and the photos you upload - check a price the first time we price a new type of job - read tenant reports and their photos so the property manager gets a clear summary - answer your questions in the help assistant - summarise a dispute for our staff, who make the decision - read the licence and insurance documents a contractor uploads, so our staff can check them faster - find trade businesses to invite to join, help us draft replies to them, and check whether a reply is a clear yes, so we can send the sign-up link What AI does not get. When we send your job to AI to scope or price it, we leave out your name, contact details, payment details and street address. What AI does not decide. AI does not set your price, does not decide which contractor gets your job, and does not approve or reject a contractor. Our staff check AI output where it matters. We do not sell your information, and we do not use it to train anyone's AI model. Decisions our systems make automatically: - Your price is calculated by our own systems from Karua's rate for that type of job. A new type of job, or one our systems are unsure about, is checked by our staff before it can be booked or sent to a contractor. - Which contractor is offered your job. Our systems rank vetted contractors and may offer your job automatically. The ranking uses how close the contractor is to your job, their customer ratings, how many jobs they have completed, and whether the job matches a specialty they listed. It never uses how fast someone works or whether they have declined jobs before. - Whether to send you our sign-up link. If AI reads your reply as a clear yes to joining, we send the link. Anything unclear goes to a person. The link only lets you apply; a person still checks your licence and insurance before you get any work. If an automated decision affects you and you want a person to look at it, email us (section 11). 4. WHO WE SHARE IT WITH - A contractor we offer your job to: the job description, the suburb (never the street address), the time window, and the photos you uploaded, so they can judge the job before accepting. Your name, contact details, full address and access notes are withheld until they accept. - The contractor who accepts: all of the above, plus your name, phone, email, full address, on-site contact and access notes. They are now your contracting party for the work and need to know who you are and where to go. - Your property manager: a tenant's report, where the job came through a tenant reporting link. - Stripe: payment information, your email, and a contractor's payout details, to take payment and pay contractors. - Our platform provider (Base44): everything we hold. They host our app and database, and send our emails. - AI services: as described in section 3. - OpenStreetMap: the address or suburb you type, or your device's location if you tap "use my location", to find and confirm your address on the map. - Google: emails sent to and from our professionals@ mailbox. If you speak your job description in Chrome, your browser sends the recording to Google to turn it into text. - Professional advisers, insurers or authorities: what is needed, for a legal claim, an insurance matter, or where the law requires it. We do not sell your personal information to anyone. What a contractor may do with your details. Our agreement with every contractor says they may use your details only for your job, must keep them confidential and secure, must not keep them longer than their own record-keeping obligations require, must not contact you for any other purpose, and must tell us at once if they lose them. 5. INFORMATION SENT OVERSEAS Some of the services above store or process information outside Australia, mainly in the United States and the United Kingdom, and possibly other countries where those services run. This includes our platform provider, the AI services, Stripe, Google and OpenStreetMap. By using Karua you acknowledge this. An overseas recipient may not be bound by the same privacy protections as apply in Australia. 6. WHY WE COLLECT IT We collect this information to provide the service you asked for. If you do not give us what section 1 lists, we may not be able to price your job, send someone, or take payment. 7. MESSAGES AND MARKETING We send you messages about your jobs. Those are part of the service. You can choose which notifications you receive in your notification settings, though we always send the essential ones about payment and completion of your own jobs. If we send you marketing, it will say who it is from and how to stop it, and you can opt out at any time. 8. SECURITY We hold your information on our platform provider's systems. Access is limited: contractors see only jobs offered or assigned to them, your full address and access notes are withheld until a contractor accepts, and only Karua staff can see the whole record. Card details are held by Stripe, not by us. No system is perfectly secure. If a breach happens that is likely to cause you serious harm, we will tell you and the regulator as the law requires. 9. HOW LONG WE KEEP IT - Job descriptions you started but never booked: 90 days after you last worked on them. - Photographs of your property: 2 years after the job ends. - Job, payment and invoice records: 7 years after the job ends, to meet tax and legal record-keeping rules. - Help assistant conversations: 12 months. - Contractor records: 7 years after the contractor stops working through Karua. - Contractor applications that are not approved: 12 months after the decision. - Trade businesses we invited who did not join: 12 months after the last contact. If you asked us to stop emailing, we keep only your email address, so we never email you again. We keep information longer only while a dispute, claim or legal requirement needs it. After these periods we delete it or remove what identifies you. 10. CONTRACTORS: YOUR VETTING RECORD If you work through Karua, we hold a vetting record about you: your licence and insurance status, your ABN, identity checks, information from public sources, and your record of completed jobs and customer approvals. We use it to decide whether to activate you and whether to offer you work. It is internal. We do not publish it, and we do not share it with customers or other contractors. Some of it is produced automatically and may be wrong. A person makes every vetting decision. You can ask what we hold about you and ask us to correct it (section 11). 11. ACCESS, CORRECTION AND DELETION You can ask for a copy of the personal information we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. Email info@karua.com.au. We will respond within 30 days and will not charge you for asking. We may not be able to give you everything, for example where it would unreasonably affect someone else's privacy. We may need to keep some information for a tax or legal obligation or an unresolved dispute. If we refuse a request, we will tell you why. 12. COMPLAINTS Tell us first at info@karua.com.au. We aim to acknowledge your complaint within one business day and to respond within 30 days. If you are not satisfied, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner at oaic.gov.au. 13. CHANGES TO THIS POLICY We may update this policy. The current version is always at karua.com.au/privacy, with its version number. If we make a significant change to how we use your information, we will tell you.