Privacy at Pars Painting Melbourne

Who this page is about

This page describes how Pars Painting Melbourne (ABN 91 628 731 911), a painting business operating in Melbourne, Victoria, handles the information people send through this website. We do not publish a street address; the contact points below are the ones to use.

• Phone: 0402 242 442
• General and privacy enquiries: info@ppmel.com.au
• Quote enquiries: quotes@ppmel.com.au

What this page is, and what it is not

This is a plain description of the data this website collects, where it goes and who else can see it. It is written so you can decide what to send before you send it.

It is not a legal opinion and it does not state that Pars Painting Melbourne is legally required to follow the Australian Privacy Principles, or that it is compliant with them. Whether the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) applies to a particular business depends on annual turnover and other factors, and that question has not been determined for Pars Painting Melbourne. If you want to understand the general rules, the OAIC publishes guidance on when the Privacy Act covers a small business and guidance on what an open and transparent privacy policy should explain.

What you can send us through this website

Nothing on this website asks you to create an account, and no information is collected from you until you choose to send it.

• Quote form (contact page): one contact method (a phone number or an email address), plus your optional name, suburb and service choice, an optional property status, a project package, the deadline driver and an optional target date, an optional non-personal referral code, and the free-text project details you write. Our own code adds three non-personal routing values you do not type: a fixed source category, the page you first landed on and the page you are sending from.
• WhatsApp: anything you choose to send us there, including project photos, is sent by you from your own device.

Where the form details go

The quote form on this website posts to FormSubmit, an external form-processing service, which emails the submitted details to our quote mailbox at quotes@ppmel.com.au. This website does not run a customer database, a CRM or any other store of enquiry records: there is no repository of your details in the code that serves these pages.

FormSubmit is therefore a third party that handles your enquiry before we do. Its documentation currently states that form submissions are retained for 30 days, and that uploaded files are not retained by it or made available through its submissions API. Its privacy page sets out its own terms. Those are FormSubmit's statements about FormSubmit's systems; we cannot verify or control what it does internally.

The copy that reaches our mailbox is subject to the ordinary retention of that mailbox and its email provider.

Project photos

The quote form is text-only and does not accept photo uploads. If you want Kian to see something before he visits, you can send photos yourself through WhatsApp from your own device. Photos are background for the visit and are never used to price the work.

An earlier version of this website had a separate photo-upload form that sent images through FormSubmit. It has been removed, and this website no longer accepts photo uploads.

Please keep faces, identity documents, mail, keys, alarm panels, financial documents, valuables and other sensitive details out of any project image. Photos can also carry filename, camera and location metadata that you may not intend to share. We only need to see the surfaces, their condition and the access.

The former AI helper

Earlier versions of this website included an AI helper, Kian AI. Questions typed into it were sent to OpenAI through this website's own server, and a contact form inside it forwarded details to FormSubmit. Both have been removed. Nothing you type on this website is now sent to OpenAI or to any other AI provider, and the two server addresses the helper used return an empty response without reading the request or contacting any other service.

For messages typed into the helper before it was removed: the server sent store: false, so the exchange was not retained by OpenAI for later retrieval. That is not the same as zero retention. OpenAI's API data controls documentation currently states that data submitted through the API is not used to train its models unless you opt in, and that under its default settings API content may be retained for up to 30 days for abuse monitoring. We rely on those published statements; we cannot inspect OpenAI's systems.

Analytics, cookies and browser storage

This website loads one analytics script: Vercel Web Analytics, provided by Vercel, the company that hosts this site. It is served from this site’s own address (/_vercel/insights/script.js) and reports the page you viewed and the site or search engine you arrived from to a first-party address on this same domain. It sets no cookie and writes nothing to your browser’s storage. No tag manager and no advertising script is loaded, and no custom event describing you is recorded. Vercel processes those page views on its own servers under its own documentation, which we do not control. A content blocker stops the script loading, and every part of this site continues to work without it.

Our own code loads no vendor tag of its own. It pushes a small number of non-personal event names — such as a phone-link click or a package selection — into a dataLayer array in your browser. Because no vendor tag reads that array, it is not sent anywhere.

Our code sets no cookies and writes nothing to localStorage. It writes two sessionStorage entries, both scoped to the one browser tab and both discarded by your browser when you close it.

• ppmel:acquisition-source — written only if you arrived from ChatGPT, and only ever set to the single fixed word chatgpt_referral. It exists so that a quote request you send from a later page still shows where you came from, instead of that context being lost the moment you click an internal link. It holds no URL, no search terms, no identifier and nothing you typed, and it is not sent to any analytics service.
• ppmel:acquisition-context — written once, on the first page you open in a tab. It holds two values and nothing else: a fixed category describing the kind of source that sent you (ai_assistant, partner_offer, search_engine, google_business_profile, social, other_referral or direct), and the path of the page you arrived on, such as /guides/house-painting-cost-melbourne/. The google_business_profile category is recognised only from our fixed Google Business Profile link tags; arbitrary campaign values are not copied or stored. It exists so a quote request sent from a later page can still say how you found us. It holds no web address, no search wording, no campaign text and no identifier, and a value that is not one of those fixed categories or a plain site path is ignored rather than used.

Pages on this site link out to Houzz, Instagram, Google Maps, WhatsApp and the services named above. Those are separate companies with their own policies and their own data practices, and this page does not describe them.

Why we use what you send

We use the details you send in order to answer your enquiry, understand the property and the surfaces involved, understand the enquiry and arrange an in-person visit, prepare and discuss a quote, carry out and invoice agreed work, and keep the ordinary business records that follow from it. We do not sell your details, and we do not send marketing to people who have only asked for a quote.

How long we keep it

We keep enquiry details for as long as they are reasonably needed for the enquiry, any work that follows and the ordinary business and tax records connected to it, and then remove them or allow them to expire. We do not publish a fixed retention schedule, because an enquiry that becomes a job is kept for a different length of time from one that goes nowhere.

Copies held by FormSubmit and by our email provider follow their retention, not ours, as described above.

Asking for access, correction or deletion

Email info@ppmel.com.au and tell us enough to identify the enquiry — usually the mobile number or email address you used and roughly when you sent it. We will look through what we hold in our own mailbox and records, tell you what is there, correct anything that is wrong, and delete what we are not required to keep.

We can only act on our own copies. We cannot promise removal from a third party's systems, archives or backups, including FormSubmit, OpenAI or our email provider; you would need to approach them directly for that.

Processing outside Australia

FormSubmit is operated overseas, so information sent through the forms is processed and may be stored outside Australia. OpenAI, which processed messages typed into the former AI helper, is also operated overseas. The specific countries, data centres and sub-processors are determined by those providers rather than by Pars Painting Melbourne, and they can change without notice to us.

Security, and its limits

This website is served over HTTPS. No page on it sends what you type to an AI provider, and the two addresses the former AI helper used now return an empty response without reading the request or contacting any other service.

Those measures reduce risk; they do not remove it. No website, form service or email system can be guaranteed secure. Please do not send identity documents, payment card details, passwords, alarm codes or key information through this website or by email.

Questions and complaints

Send any privacy question, correction request or complaint to info@ppmel.com.au, or call 0402 242 442. Tell us what happened and what you would like done, and we will respond directly.

If you are not satisfied with our response, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner publishes information about raising a privacy concern.

Changes to this page

We update this page when the website changes — for example if a form field or a provider changes. The date at the top of the page shows when it was last reviewed. Nothing here is a promise about how the site will work in the future; check the current version before sending information you care about.