Privacy policy

Who is collecting it, and who to contact

ETP Consulting Pty Ltd, trading as Evolution Web Studio, operating from Redlands and greater Brisbane, Queensland and working with small businesses anywhere in Australia. Privacy questions go to Tony Pope at hello@evolutionwebstudio.com or 0431 124 128. That address reaches a person, not a queue.

What is collected

From the enquiry form: your name, business name, email address, and optionally your phone number, current website address, a description of what you need, your timing, a budget band and how you found this site. Only your name, your business name, your email address and the description of what you need are required. Everything else is optional.

From the estimator: the ten answers you gave, the figure they produced, and the name, business name, email address and optional phone number you entered to see it. The answers are kept beside the figure on purpose, because a number with no record of what produced it protects nobody.

When you pay for something: your card details are entered on the payment provider’s own page and are never seen here. What comes back to me is your name, your email address, the amount, the last four digits of the card and whether it succeeded. For a Website Diagnostic the checkout also asks for the web address you want reviewed, and that is the only extra field it collects.

From ordinary web serving: the hosting provider records standard server and request information, including IP addresses, as part of delivering and protecting the site. That is a function of the internet rather than a choice made here, and it is not combined with anything else or used to build a profile.

During a project: the business facts, content, images and account access you provide so the work can be done, plus the ordinary records of the engagement.

What is never collected

• Passwords or multi-factor authentication codes. Access is always by named invitation to an account you own.
• Card, bank or payment details. Those are typed on the payment provider’s page, and there is no card form on this site and never will be.
• Sensitive information as defined by the Privacy Act, including health, biometric, racial or ethnic, political, religious and sexual-orientation information. If a project would require collecting any of that, it is outside the standard product and the fit gate says so before a quote exists.

Why it is collected and what it is used for

To answer your enquiry, prepare a proposal, deliver an agreed project, invoice for it, keep proper business records and meet legal obligations. It is not used for unrelated marketing, and you are not added to a mailing list because you sent an enquiry. There is no mailing list. If one is ever started it will be opt-in, the box will not be ticked for you, and every message will carry a working unsubscribe.

Who else touches it

Only the service providers needed to run the business, each named rather than left as a category:

• Netlify, which hosts this site, registers the two forms and holds their submissions.
• Google Workspace, which is the business email and calendar, and is where a form notification lands, where a reply is written, and where the studio’s own records of enquiries and estimates are kept.
• Google Analytics, which counts page views and a handful of named actions, and is the only thing on this site that loads from another company’s server. It receives the page address, the referring address, an approximate location derived from an IP address that it is told to truncate, and the device and browser type. It is not given your name, your email address, your phone number, anything you typed into a form, or any identifier that would let it recognise you on a second visit, because there is no such identifier to give it: see cookies and tracking below.
• Stripe, which takes card payments. You give your card details to Stripe, not to me, and Stripe is the one holding them.
• Xero, which raises and records invoices, holding your business name, contact details and the amount.

Each is used for its own function and none is given information for its own purposes. Nothing is sold, and nothing is handed to an advertising platform, because there is no advertising platform attached to this site. If a provider on this list changes, this page changes with it, under a new version.

Where it goes overseas

Yes, and here is where. Netlify and Google are United States companies and hold data there, and Google also processes in other countries where it operates facilities. Stripe states that it may transfer personal data to countries including the United States and India. Xero publishes that it replicates data between data centres in different locations without naming them, and its current stated position is recorded in my own supplier register, which you can ask for.

That is normal for cloud services and it is disclosed here rather than buried. No provider is used for a purpose other than the one it is named for above.

Where a submission is recorded

A form submission is written to three places, and all three are described here rather than only the obvious one.

The form store. The host keeps the submission and sends a notification to the business mailbox. This is the copy that gets read and acted on, and it holds what you typed.

A second record, so a lost enquiry is visible. A notification can land in spam or be filed by a rule, and then nobody knows an enquiry existed. So a small function records that a submission arrived: the time, which form, the submission identifier and the reference shown on your own screen, and the NAMES of the fields you filled in. It does not record what you typed. If a webhook to the business owner’s own systems is configured, that second copy does carry the submission, and it goes nowhere else. Where that is switched on, it writes a row into a private worklist in the Google Workspace account named above, and for an estimate it also files a document there holding your details, the figure and the answers that produced it, so the estimate exists as a record rather than only as a message. That account is Tony Pope’s own and nothing is shared out of it.

The point of the second record is that a missing enquiry shows up as a discrepancy between two records rather than as an absence in one. It is a receipt, not a copy.

A browser-sent security report. This site tells your browser to load nothing from anywhere except this site and the two measurement addresses named above, and your browser reports it if that rule is ever broken. Those reports are logged so a blocked script or font is visible rather than silent. Three things are kept from each one and nothing else: which rule fired, the host that was blocked, and the path of the page it happened on. The report your browser sends can also include a fragment of the blocked code and the page you came from; both are discarded before anything is written down. No report is ever tied to you and none is stored beyond the log.

The communications record. A private business record of what has passed between us: your submission as you wrote it, the reply that was sent back to you, and whether that reply actually went out. It is kept so that neither of us has to rely on memory about what was asked and what was answered, and so a reply that failed to send is visible rather than silent. It holds what you typed and the reply that was written back, and it deliberately does not hold your IP address or your browser details: the host adds those to every submission and they are removed before anything is written down, because they are not something you told us. It is on the site host, it is not readable from a web page, it is not part of anything published, and it is read from a terminal by Tony Pope. Nothing in it is ever added to a mailing list or used for any purpose other than answering you and keeping proper business records.

The reply, and who sends it. When you leave an email address you get an acknowledgement, and if you ran the estimator you get the estimate with every answer that produced it. That letter is recorded before it is sent and the outcome of the attempt is recorded after, so a letter that did not arrive can be found and sent again.

Decisions made by software on this site

Two things here reach a conclusion without a person in the loop, and both are disclosed rather than left to be discovered.

The scope check takes eight answers about your job and returns whether it fits the standard product. It can return a decline. It runs entirely in your browser and sends nothing anywhere, so it uses no personal information at all.

The estimator takes ten answers about your job and returns a price range or a fixed express price. It uses the answers you gave plus the name, business name, email address and optional phone number you entered. It decides which product your job looks like and what that costs, and it can decide that your job is outside the express tiers.

Neither decides whether you can buy, and neither ends the conversation: every result is an indication that a person then checks, and the record of the answers exists precisely so a wrong answer can be corrected by talking. From 10 December 2026 the Privacy Act requires this disclosure where software makes a decision that could significantly affect somebody. My own assessment is that a fit indication and a price range routed to a human conversation sit below that line, and the section is published anyway, because a reader deciding whether to trust a number is better served by knowing how it was produced than by my view of a threshold.

How long it is kept

Enquiries that do not become projects are kept while the enquiry is live and then for a reasonable period afterwards in case you come back. Project and financial records are kept for as long as business and tax record-keeping requires, then deleted. If you ask for your information to be deleted, anything not required to be retained will be.

The communications record described above has a retention window with a command behind it rather than only an intention, and running it reports exactly what it removed. A statement that records are cleared out on a schedule is worth nothing if nothing ever clears them out.

How it is protected

Multi-factor authentication on every account that holds it, least-privilege access, encrypted transport, and no copies kept on devices that do not need them. No system is perfectly secure and nobody honest claims otherwise. If a breach ever occurred that was likely to cause serious harm, you would be told, along with what happened and what to do about it.

Cookies and tracking

No cookies are set by this site, and nothing is stored in your browser. Version 1.0 of this policy said there was no analytics either, and promised that if a future version added it this page would say so before it went live, under a new version. This is that version, so here is exactly what was added and exactly what it can and cannot do.

What is installed. Google Analytics 4, and nothing else. No tag manager, no advertising pixel, no remarketing tag, no session recorder, no heat map, no chat widget, no third-party font, no embedded video. Everything else on every page still comes from this site and only this site, which is why the fonts are served from here and the booking page is a link you press rather than a window inside this one.

It is installed with consent mode set to denied for every storage category, before the measurement code loads, which is the only order in which that instruction counts. The consequences are the point: no _ga cookie is written, no client identifier is created or kept, and you are counted as a new visitor every time you arrive, because there is nothing stored that could tell the difference. Advertising data redaction is on and Google Signals is off.

That is also why there is no cookie banner. A banner exists to buy your permission to store something on your device. Nothing is stored on your device, so there is nothing to ask for, and being asked to click a box for the privilege of reading a page is a cost paid by every visitor for the benefit of the site owner. If that ever changes, a banner will appear and this section will be rewritten under a new version first.

What is measured. Page views, and seven named actions, each recorded with the page it happened on: a phone number tapped, an email address tapped, a payment link pressed, a booking link pressed, an enquiry form sent, the estimator run, and the scope check run. Nothing you typed is included in any of them, only the fact that the form was sent.

Why it is here at all. Because without it nobody can say which page produced an enquiry, and a website nobody can measure is a website nobody can improve on purpose. It is also not recoverable retrospectively: measurement only records from the day it is installed. That argument is made on this site as a paid recommendation about other people’s websites, and it would be hard to make honestly while declining to follow it here.

If you would rather not be counted. This site honours Global Privacy Control and the older Do Not Track setting: if your browser sends either one, the measurement code returns without loading anything at all, and no request to Google is made from your visit. Your browser’s own tracker blocking, or any blocker you have installed, also stops it, and nothing on this site behaves differently or asks you to turn it off.

Two things store nothing but are worth naming so the list is complete. The estimator and the scope check keep your answers in sessionStorage, which is this browser tab, on your own device, so that pressing back does not wipe what you typed. It is cleared when you close the tab, it is never sent anywhere except when you press the button that says it will be, and it is not a cookie and not a tracker.

Access, correction and complaints

Email hello@evolutionwebstudio.com and say what you want: a copy of what is held, a correction, or deletion. Include enough for me to find you, which is usually the email address you used. There is no charge and no form.

You get an acknowledgement within two business days and an answer within thirty days, normally a great deal sooner. If I refuse any part of a request you are told which part and why, in writing.

If you are unhappy with how a privacy matter has been handled, say so to me first and it goes to Tony Pope rather than to a queue. If that does not settle it, you can take it to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner at oaic.gov.au.

Where this business sits under the Privacy Act

This practice is below the annual turnover threshold at which the Australian Privacy Principles bind a small business. It applies them anyway, in full, and this policy is written to the same content requirements as one that had no choice.

That is not generosity and it is worth being plain about why. A studio that holds the keys to other people’s domains, hosting and customer enquiries has no business holding itself to a lower standard than the one it asks its clients to meet. The threshold also does not protect anybody from the separate right to sue over a serious invasion of privacy, which applies to every business of every size.

Client sites

Where a website is built for a client, the client is responsible for their own site’s privacy handling. The data schedule in the project agreement records what their forms collect, which processors are involved, what tracking is present, how long data is kept and what is excluded, and the client approves it before launch. Sensitive or regulated intake is not built into the standard product.

Changes to this policy are published below with a version number and a date. Material changes affecting an active project are told to that client directly rather than left to be discovered.

Every version of this document

Changes are published here with a version number, a date and a note saying what moved. Nothing is edited quietly.

Version 1.3, 11 September 2026

The opening paragraph names who the operator works with, and it read "Queensland, and remote across Australia". The practice serves small businesses anywhere in Australia and always has, so the sentence now says that. No change to what is collected, who receives it, how long it is kept or any right under it: the only thing that changed is the description of the market, which is a correction rather than a new position. Recorded as a version because this paragraph is inside the fingerprinted body and a published term that can change silently is a term nobody can rely on.

Version 1.2, 11 September 2026

Enquiries and estimates are now filed into the studio's own Google Workspace, where the operator's worklist and the estimate documents are kept, so the Google Workspace entry names that and the second-record section says what gets written there. Nothing new is collected and no new company receives anything: the recipient was already named for mail and calendar, and this says what else it holds. Published before the capture was switched on, because a disclosure that arrives after the first record is written is late.

Version 1.1, 11 September 2026

Google Analytics 4 was installed. Version 1.0 said this page would be rewritten under a new version before analytics went live, so this is that rewrite: Google Analytics is added as a named recipient with what it receives and what it is never given, the cookies section now states that consent mode is denied for every storage category so no cookie is written and no client identifier is kept, the seven measured actions are listed, and the Global Privacy Control and Do Not Track behaviour is published. No cookie banner, because nothing is stored to consent to.

Version 1.0, 11 September 2026

First version under the register. Adds the payment processor as a named recipient, the Diagnostic's single collected field, and the automated decision section that the Privacy Act requires from 10 December 2026.

The visible text of this document is fingerprinted when the site is built and checked against the version above. Change a word without adding a version here and the build fails, so the change cannot reach the internet. A list of changes nothing enforces is a list of the changes somebody remembered to write down.