Privacy policy

The Education Directory (theeducation.directory) is published by Tempo Media Pty Ltd (ABN 22 100 789 848), the publisher of EducationHQ. The entity responsible for your personal information is Tempo Media Pty Ltd, PO Box 250, Brunswick West VIC 3055, Australia. You can reach us through the contact form.

Teachers. When you send an enquiry from a listing (only Gold listings have an enquiry form) we collect your name, email address, school (if you give it) and message. The enquiry is stored in the directory and emailed to the provider. You receive a short receipt by email. When you use the contact form we collect your name, email address, the topic and your message; that message is emailed to us and is not stored on the site; we keep only a count against your email address and connection for a day or two so the form cannot be flooded.

Providers. When you create an account we collect the business name, contact name, email address and phone number you give us. Your provider record may also hold the business website and ABN, carried over from the old site or added by our staff, together with the listings you create or claim and the edits you make to them. Your password is stored only as a hash.

Payments. Card and invoice payments are handled by Stripe and PayPal payments by PayPal. We never see or store card numbers; we keep a record of each Gold period and invoice (the listing, the amount, the dates and its status) and a reference to your customer record with Stripe. Stripe’s and PayPal’s own privacy policies apply to what they collect.

Technical. When an enquiry is sent, the sender’s IP address is kept only as a keyed hash, used to limit how many enquiries can be sent from one connection in an hour. The counters that limit sign-in attempts, account requests and form submissions hold the IP address, and for the contact form and enquiry receipts the email address, in a key for the length of their window (up to a day) and for up to two days after it closes, when the nightly job removes them. An audit log records changes to the directory’s records (a listing, account or claim being created, edited or deleted, or an enquiry being edited or deleted, whether by a signed-in user, by a form on the site or by our systems) and each sign-in, sign-out and password-reset request, with what changed, the email address of the account involved and the IP address the request came from; those entries are kept for 400 days. Signing in sets one session cookie, which the browser cannot read from scripts (HttpOnly) and which expires after twelve hours. To put the listings near you first, the site guesses your state and city from your connection’s IP address with a copy of MaxMind’s GeoLite2 database held on our server; the address is looked up in memory and not stored, and the guess goes into one cookie (ted_loc, a state, an approximate point and a label, kept for a year) so the site remembers it. The location control on the home and results pages lets you set a state or postcode instead, or clear the cookie; “Use my location” asks your browser for your position once, with the browser’s own permission prompt, and keeps the answer in the same cookie. This product includes GeoLite2 data created by MaxMind, available from maxmind.com. Videos on Gold listings are embedded YouTube (through its privacy-enhanced youtube-nocookie.com) or Vimeo players, which load from those sites and may set their own cookies once you play one.

Analytics. We use Google Analytics 4 to see which pages are read, where visitors come from and how quickly they load. It sets its own cookies (named _ga) that tell repeat visits apart; it does not receive your name, email or anything you type, and Google anonymises IP addresses. Blocking cookies or using a browser's tracking protection stops it and nothing on the site changes. Separately, the site counts, as totals per listing per day, how often each listing is shown (on our pages and on EducationHQ's) and how often its page is viewed; your browser sends us the listings it showed and, for a page view, whether you came to it from EducationHQ, and we store only the totals, never anything about you (no cookie, IP address or other identifier).

Advertising. The site's pages, other than the provider account pages and error pages, carry advertisements served by Google Ad Manager, including a banner fixed to the bottom of the window that you can close. When one of those pages loads, Google receives your IP address, your browser's details, the page's address and the address of the page you came from, including any search words in them. Google, and the advertisers and advertising companies that buy space through it, may place and read cookies in your browser (Google's include __gads, __gpi and __eoi), use web beacons and use your IP address to serve, measure and personalise ads, including ads based on your visits to this and other sites. Besides that, we tell Google only what kind of page is showing (its section, state, listing or article); we never send your name, email address or location cookie. Ads are shown in a frame of their own that cannot read the page. You can turn off personalised ads at Google's My Ad Center, and Google explains how it uses information from sites that use its services. Blocking cookies stops the cookies and nothing else on the site changes.

To deliver enquiries from teachers to providers and answer questions sent to us; to run provider accounts, listings and billing; to prevent abuse of the forms and sign-in; to show and measure the advertising that keeps the directory free for teachers; and to keep the site secure and find out what went wrong when something fails.

Providers receive the enquiries sent about their listings, including the teacher’s name, email address, school and message. Stripe and PayPal process payments. Amazon Web Services hosts the site, stores uploaded images and sends our email, and Neon hosts the database. Google receives what is described under Analytics above. Google and the advertising companies that buy space through it receive what is described under Advertising. We do not share personal information with anyone else and we do not sell it.

Enquiries are kept for one year after they are sent and then deleted. Audit log entries are kept for 400 days. Provider accounts and listings are kept until they are deleted; deleting a listing also deletes its enquiries and claims. Payment records stay with Stripe and PayPal under their own retention rules. Copies of deleted records remain in our database backups for up to seven months, after which those backups are deleted too.

Under the Australian Privacy Principles you can ask to see the personal information we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or complain about how we have handled it. Contact us and we will respond within 30 days. If you are not satisfied with our response you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner at oaic.gov.au.

The directory is for teachers and the providers of excursions, incursions and camps. We do not ask for, and providers should not send us, information about students.

When this policy changes we update the date at the top of this page. Changes that affect how we use information already collected will be explained here before they take effect.