This policy explains what personal information this website collects, why it is collected, who it is disclosed to, and how you can reach it, correct it, delete it or complain about it. It describes this site and the systems immediately behind it.
Fucharmonk Australia is operated by Fucharmonk.
Whether the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) binds a business of our size turns on annual turnover, and we do not think that is the interesting question. We have chosen to handle personal information in accordance with the Australian Privacy Principles regardless of which side of that threshold we sit on. Where this policy says we do something, treat it as a commitment we expect to be held to.
A note on the square brackets below. Text in square brackets is a detail the business must confirm before this page is complete. It is marked rather than guessed, because a plausible invented detail on a page like this is worse than a visible gap.
What we collect
What you type into an enquiry form
Every enquiry form on this site is the same form with different questions switched on, and the questions it can ask are a fixed list, because each answer has to have somewhere to go:
Your name, telephone number and email address. These are the only three that cannot be switched off, because an enquiry nobody can reply to is not an enquiry.
Your studio or practice name.
Your suburb or city, and your state or territory.
The service you are interested in.
The type of practice you run.
Your website address.
An indicative monthly marketing budget, chosen from ranges.
Your message.
Everything after the first three is optional. There is no hidden question set behind the form and no general answers table underneath it: a question with nowhere to store its answer cannot be added without a change to the software. That is why there is no field here for a postcode, an ABN, a date of birth or a government identifier.
We do not ask for sensitive information as the Privacy Act defines it — health information, biometric information, or information about race, religion, political opinion, membership of an association, sexual orientation or a criminal record — and there is no field in which to record it. Please do not put it in the message box.
What is recorded alongside your enquiry
So that we know where an enquiry came from, we also store:
The page you submitted from, and the page you first landed on.
The referring address your browser reported, if it reported one.
Campaign tags in the address you arrived on — utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_term and utm_content.
An acquisition channel derived from those two. Organic search, paid search, paid social, social, referral, direct, or a referral from an AI assistant. It is derived only from what your browser reported; we never infer that you “probably” came from somewhere.
Which variant of a page heading you were shown, where that page was running a variation test.
Your address, briefly, for anti-abuse
The enquiry endpoint is rate limited, which means your IP address and your email address in lower case are each recorded as the key of a counter — an identifier, a time window, and a number of attempts. Those counters are deleted automatically by the application once their window has passed.
Your IP address is not stored on the enquiry record itself. There is no column for it, and no column for your browser's user agent either.
How quickly the pages load
Pages on this site measure their own loading and responsiveness — the Core Web Vitals — and send the result to this site's own server. What is sent is the name of the metric, its value, a good, needs-improvement or poor rating, the path of the page with any query string stripped, how the page was navigated to, and whether the device is broadly a mobile or a desktop. No identifier of any kind is attached, it is not sent from the administration area, and it does not follow you from page to page. It is stored on our own infrastructure and shared with nobody.
In the interests of saying the awkward part out loud: this measurement runs for every visitor and is not currently switched off by a Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal. We think that is defensible because the record it creates cannot be connected to a person, but we would rather tell you than let you assume otherwise.
Cookies
This website sets no cookie of its own on a visitor's browser. The only cookies this application sets belong to the administration area: a signed session cookie for someone who has logged in, a short-lived cookie during two-step sign-in, and a cookie that lets a reviewer preview unpublished content. All three are set only after somebody signs in, all three are marked HTTP-only so page scripts cannot read them, and none of them is used to follow a visitor around.
We do not use third-party advertising cookies of our own on this site.
Analytics and advertising tags
The site is built to accept the usual measurement tags — Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Google Ads, the Meta Pixel and Microsoft Clarity. Each is off until an administrator enters an identifier for it, and the last three additionally require the hosting environment to enable them. Where no identifier is entered, nothing loads and no request is made to that provider at all.
Tags enabled on this site: none. No identifier has been entered for any of them, so no Google, Meta or Microsoft measurement code loads and no request is made to any of those providers.
Where one is enabled, it is that provider's code running in your browser under that provider's own terms. It may set its own cookies, it will receive your IP address as part of the request, and in the case of Microsoft Clarity it records how the page was used so the session can be replayed. Google, Meta and Microsoft each process that information outside Australia.
What those providers do not get is your enquiry. The conversion event this site can raise when an enquiry is created carries an opaque reference and categorical fields such as the service and the city, and deliberately carries no name, email address, telephone number or message.
Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control. This site's own event tracking checks for a Do Not Track header, a Global Privacy Control signal and a site consent flag before it raises anything, and sends nothing when any of them says no. The same check runs on the server before the enquiry conversion event is sent. Be clear about the limit of that, though: it governs the events we raise. It does not by itself switch off a third-party tag's own page-view collection, which is governed by that provider.
There is no cookie consent banner on this site today. The tracking code already reads a consent flag, so a banner can be added without rewriting it, and this policy will be updated when one is.
How we use it
To answer your enquiry and to have the conversation you asked for.
To provide the services you engage us for.
To understand which pages and channels produce enquiries, so we can decide where to put effort.
To keep the site working and to hold off automated abuse of the enquiry form.
Where the enquiry form tells you an address is used only to reply to that enquiry, that is the actual limit on the use rather than a form of words.
Automated decisions
No computer program on this site makes a decision about you. Enquiries are read and answered by people, and the judgements that follow — whether to reply, what to propose, what to charge — are made by people.
Several steps around that are automatic, and they are worth naming so the sentence above is not doing quiet work. The enquiry form carries a field a person never sees and an automated submitter usually fills in; anything that fills it is discarded. Every submission is validated on the server against the questions that form was configured to ask. The endpoint is rate limited by address and by email. And each enquiry is filed against an acquisition channel worked out from the campaign tags and referring address your browser supplied. Each of those accepts a submission, refuses it, or files it. None of them reaches a conclusion about you.
That distinction is about to have a name in the legislation. Australian Privacy Principles 1.7, 1.8 and 1.9, inserted by the Privacy and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2024 (Cth), commence on 10 December 2026. From that date a privacy policy must disclose where the entity has arranged for a computer program to use personal information to make — or to do something substantially and directly related to making — a decision that could reasonably be expected to significantly affect an individual's rights or interests, and must describe the kinds of personal information used and the kinds of decisions made. Nothing above meets that test. If that ever changes, this section will set out both before the program is switched on, not after.
Who it is disclosed to
The people who operate this site and answer enquiries.
Our email delivery provider, which carries the notification containing your enquiry to whichever addresses are configured to receive it. Where no provider is configured, no notification is sent and the enquiry stays in our own database.
A notification tool, such as a team chat channel or an automation service, where the operator has configured one to receive a summary of new enquiries.
Analytics providers, on the terms set out above.
Anyone we are required by law to disclose to.
We do not sell personal information. We do not rent it, trade it or licence it, and we do not disclose it to any third party for that party's own marketing. There is no arrangement of that kind and no code path that would carry one out.
Direct marketing
An enquiry is not consent to a mailing list. That is the position Australian Privacy Principle 7 takes, it is the position the Spam Act 2003 (Cth) takes, and it is the position we take here. Consent under the Spam Act is either given expressly or inferred from an existing business relationship, and asking us a question is neither: it is a question, and reading it as permission to market to you is the reading that suits us rather than the one that suits you.
In practice: if you ask us a question, we answer your question. We do not add you to a newsletter because you asked one.
If we send commercial electronic messages at all, they will be sent on the basis of consent, they will identify us accurately with contact details that stay reachable, and they will carry an unsubscribe facility that does not require you to log in, create an account or explain yourself, and that keeps working for at least 30 days after the message was sent. Unsubscribe requests are actioned promptly, and the address is kept on a suppression list rather than deleted — deleting it is how people end up being mailed again.
Telephone contact is on the same footing. We ring about the enquiry you made. Outbound calling to people who have not contacted us engages the Do Not Call Register Act 2006 (Cth), which is a separate regime and would need its own process.
How long we keep it
Australian Privacy Principle 11 requires personal information to be destroyed or de-identified once it is no longer needed for any purpose for which it may be used or disclosed, and is not required by law to be kept.
Two honest observations about how that plays out here. The rate-limiting counters described above are deleted automatically by the application. Enquiry records are not — nothing in this software deletes them on a schedule, so they persist until a person removes them.
Our retention period for enquiry records is 24 months from our last contact with you, after which we delete them. Because that deletion is a manual step rather than an automatic one, treat the period as the commitment and the mechanism as our problem, not yours. If you would like your enquiry removed sooner than that, ask, and we will.
Where it is stored
This site runs on Vercel, with its server-side code executing in Vercel's Sydney region, and its database is Neon PostgreSQL, also in Sydney. Enquiry records are therefore stored in Australia.
Images uploaded through the administration area are stored either on the server's own disk or, where the deployment is configured for it, in storage that speaks the S3 protocol. No such storage is configured at present, so this does not currently apply; if we enable it we will name the provider and its region here. No enquiry or visitor information is written to it in any case.
Where an email delivery provider or an analytics tag is in use, that provider processes information overseas. That is a disclosure to an overseas recipient and we would rather name it plainly than leave it to be inferred. As things stand no email delivery provider and no analytics tag is enabled, so nothing is sent to one. What remains is that our hosting and database providers, Vercel and Neon, are United States companies: the data itself is held in Sydney, but their personnel can reach the systems that hold it, and the United States is therefore the country to name under Australian Privacy Principle 1.4(f). If we switch on an email or analytics provider we will name it and its country here. Australian Privacy Principle 8 makes us responsible for taking reasonable steps to ensure an overseas recipient handles your information consistently with the Australian Privacy Principles; choosing a provider does not hand that responsibility to them.
Security
The administration area is the only place enquiry records can be read. It is behind a signed, HTTP-only session cookie, it supports two-step verification, it can be restricted to a nominated set of IP addresses, and actions taken inside it are written to an audit log.
On the public side, the enquiry endpoint validates every submission on the server rather than trusting the browser, is rate limited by address and by email, and is write-only: it accepts a submission and returns nothing readable. The site sends a content security policy that restricts which scripts a page may load.
No system is perfectly secure, and we do not claim this one is.
If something goes wrong
If a data breach occurred that was likely to result in serious harm, the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme in Part IIIC of the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) requires notification to the individuals affected and to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. We commit to that process whether or not the scheme is compulsory for a business of our size.
Access, correction and complaints
You can ask what personal information we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. Australian Privacy Principles 12 and 13 describe the first two of those; we will act on the third as well. Write to contact@fucharmonk.com, or use our contact page.
We will need to be reasonably satisfied you are who you say you are before we hand anything over or change it, and we will respond within a reasonable time.
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your personal information or your request, tell us first — most of these turn out to be misunderstandings and we would like the chance to fix it. If that does not resolve it, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, which regulates the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and publishes its own complaint process.
Children
This site offers services to design studios and architecture practices. It is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them.
Changes to this policy
The date this policy was last updated appears at the top of this page and is taken from the record itself, so it cannot drift away from the text. Where a change is material we will describe it here rather than quietly amend a sentence.
Our terms and conditions and our disclaimer sit alongside this policy.