Privacy policy

Who we are

A Hound's Guide is an Australian guide to places you can go with a dog. It is run by a small team, and it is the only party that handles what you give it, apart from the two services named further down under who else is involved.

We handle personal information in line with the Australian Privacy Principles in the Privacy Act 1988. Parts of that Act do not strictly bind an operation this small, and we follow the principles anyway, because the alternative is deciding for ourselves what is reasonable with your information.

You can use most of the guide without telling us anything. The map, every place page and the whole directory work signed out. An account only exists so that the guide can remember things on your behalf.

Your account

An account is an email address and a display name. That is the whole of it.

• Your email address. It is how you sign in and the only way we can contact you. It is never shown to another member and never given to a venue.
• A display name. If you give us a name we use that. If you do not, one is derived from your email address, which means the part before the at sign. You can change it from your account page at any time.
• The IP address you signed up from. Recorded once, when the account is created, and kept as an abuse control. It is what lets us stop a run of fake accounts coming from one place. It is not used to work out where you live, and it is not used to build a profile of you.

There is no password. Signing in sends a six digit code to your email address, and typing that code back into the tab that asked for it is what signs you in. The code works once and it expires. Because no password is ever created, none is stored, hashed or exposed if something goes wrong elsewhere.

What the guide stores when you use it

Everything below is attached to your account, and nothing below is collected unless you do the thing that creates it.

• Saved places. A list of which places you have favourited, and when.
• Reviews and ratings. Your overall rating out of five, the optional scores for welcome, space, amenities and safety, what you wrote, and the date.
• Pet profiles. Your dog's name, size, breed and any notes you add. The size is the useful part: it lets the guide preset the filters to your actual dog rather than asking you every visit.
• Place submissions. What you sent through when you suggested a place, including the link to the page that states the dog rules, so it can be checked.

We do not ask for your address, your phone number, your date of birth or your dog's microchip number, because the guide has no use for any of them.

What other people can see

Reviews are public. A review you write appears on that place's page, with your rating, the date and a shortened display name, for example Corey C. Your email address is never shown with it, and neither is your full name unless your display name is your full name, which is your choice to make and to change.

Nothing else is public. Your saved places, your dogs and your submissions are visible to you when you are signed in, and to nobody else browsing the guide.

Your location

The map has a find my location button. Pressing it asks your browser for your position, and the browser asks you before it answers. The position is used inside the page to move the map to where you are, and that is the end of its life. It is not sent to our server, it is not written to your account, and it is not kept after you leave the page.

If you would rather not share it, do not press the button, or say no to your browser's prompt. The map works exactly the same, you just pan it yourself.

What stays in your browser

Some things are stored on your own device rather than sent to us. They sit in your browser's local storage, and clearing your browsing data clears them.

• Your sign-in token, so you are not asked for a code on every visit. Clearing it signs you out.
• Display settings, meaning theme, contrast, reduced motion and text size. These never reach us.
• Recent searches, so the search box can offer them back to you. These never reach us either.

Who else is involved

Two outside services are part of how the guide works, and a third thing is just how the web works. All three are listed here because you should not have to guess.

• OpenStreetMap. The map's tiles are fetched from OpenStreetMap's servers, so when you open the map your browser makes a request to them for every tile on screen. Those requests carry what any web request carries, including your IP address, and they reveal which part of the map you are looking at. We send them nothing else, and their own privacy policy governs what they do with it.
• A transactional email provider. Sign-in codes and any reply we send to you are delivered through an email service. It handles your email address and the contents of that message for as long as it takes to deliver it.
• The web server. Like every web server, ours keeps ordinary access logs: the page requested, the time, the browser's user agent and the IP address it came from. They are used to keep the site up and to investigate abuse, and nothing else.

There are no advertising networks, no tracking pixels and no data brokers. At the time of writing the guide loads no analytics script at all. If that changes, this page is updated before it happens, not afterwards. Your information is never sold, and it is never handed to a venue or a council.

How long we keep it, and how to delete it

Your account and what is attached to it stay while the account exists. Delete the account from your account page and the member record is removed, and the deletion cascades: your pet profiles, your saved places and your reviews go with it. They are deleted, not flagged as hidden.

If you want one review gone but want to keep your account, delete that review on its own. Everything on the account page can be edited or removed individually.

Two things survive a deletion, and both are deliberate. Server access logs age out on their own schedule. If a place you submitted has since been checked and published as an entry, the entry stays, because by then it is a factual guide entry sourced from a public policy page rather than anything of yours.

Asking for a copy, fixing something, complaining

You can see and change nearly everything yourself from your account page. For anything you cannot reach from there, email hello@ahoundsguide.com from the address on the account and say what you want.

• A copy of what is held against your email address.
• A correction, if something is wrong.
• Deletion, if you would rather we did it than do it yourself.

We will answer within a reasonable time, and within 30 days at the outside. If we ever refuse a request we will say why in writing.

If you think your information has been mishandled, tell us first and we will try to fix it. If that does not resolve it, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner at oaic.gov.au.

Security

The site is served over HTTPS, and the member database sits behind the same origin as the site rather than being exposed to the open internet. Sign-in codes are single use and short lived. The absence of passwords removes the single largest cause of account compromise, because there is nothing to guess and nothing to reuse from another breach.

No system is perfect. If you think somebody else has reached your account, clear your browser data to sign out on that device and email us so we can help.

Changes to this page

This page carries the date it last changed, at the top. If we start collecting something new, or a new service starts receiving your information, this page is updated first and the change is described here.