Privacy Policy

Last updated: 2026-09-14

Updated 2026-09-14: rewritten to describe the marketplace, customer accounts, reviews, saved cards, the cookies we set, and every service provider we actually use.

1. Who we are

Pet Pro's (the "Platform") is operated by Active Web Solutions ("AWS", "we", "us", "our"), a sole-trader web agency based in New South Wales, Australia.

  • ABN: 51 695 174 497
  • Business address: Sydney, NSW, Australia
  • Privacy and support contact: support@petpros.com.au

AWS is bound by the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs). This policy explains how we collect, hold, use, disclose, and protect personal information when you use the Platform, whether as a member of the public browsing listings or booking an appointment, as someone who holds a Pet Pro's account, as a business owner using the Platform to take bookings, or as a staff member of such a business.

2. The roles we play

Many of the businesses you book with (each a "Merchant") use the Platform to host their booking page and to appear in our marketplace. That gives us three distinct privacy roles:

  • Platform controller. For your Pet Pro's customer account, your saved cards, your reviews, your account credit, our audit and security logs, and our own usage analytics, AWS is the data controller.
  • Processor for Merchants. When you book an appointment with a Merchant, the personal information you submit (name, contact details, service selection, appointment time) is collected on behalf of that Merchant. The Merchant is the primary controller of that booking record; AWS processes it to deliver the service. Each Merchant is responsible for its own customer-facing privacy practices.
  • Publisher of business listings. Our marketplace also contains unclaimed listings that we compiled from publicly available sources, including Overture Maps and businesses' own published contact details. Those listings carry business information such as trading name, address, phone number and category. For a sole trader that information can also be personal information. An unclaimed listing is marked as not yet confirmed by the business, and the business can claim it or ask us to remove it at any time by contacting us at the address in section 17.

3. Information we collect

3.1 From members of the public booking an appointment

  • Your name.
  • Your email address (optional but recommended for confirmations and reminders).
  • Your phone number (optional, used by the Merchant to contact you about the appointment). SMS confirmations and reminders are not switched on for Pet Pro's at present, so we do not currently text you about a booking.
  • The service, staff member (if applicable), and time you select.
  • Any free-text note you add to the booking, and any answer you give on a consultation or intake form a Merchant sends you.
  • Payment details where the Merchant has enabled card payments. Card details are entered directly into a Stripe-hosted Payment Element and are never seen, stored, or processed by AWS. We only store a payment intent identifier, the charge id, the card brand, the last four digits of the card, and the amount paid (in cents).
  • Your IP address and browser user agent (for security, anti-abuse, and audit purposes).
  • Whether you ticked a box asking us to email you offers and last-minute openings, or to send you offers by SMS. We record that choice, when you made it, and which screen you made it on.

3.2 If you create a Pet Pro's account

An account is optional. You can book as a guest. If you do create one, we also hold:

  • Your verified email address and a display name.
  • If you sign in with Google, Apple or Facebook, the verified email address and the stable account identifier that provider gives us. We do not receive or store your password with that provider, and we do not keep the provider's access token after sign-in.
  • Your booking history across every Merchant you have booked with using that email address, your favourites, and your notification preferences.
  • Saved cards, if you choose to save one. The card itself is stored by Stripe against a Stripe Customer record we hold on our own Stripe account. We store only the brand, the last four digits, and the expiry, so you can recognise the card when you pay.
  • Any account credit or prepaid service pack you buy from a business, and the payment reference for it.
  • Reviews you write. A review is published publicly on the Merchant's listing under your first name and last initial, together with your rating, your comments, and any photos you attach. Photos have their embedded metadata, including any GPS coordinates your camera recorded, stripped before the photo is stored.

3.3 From Merchants and their staff

  • Business name, contact email, business address, ABN.
  • Login credentials (your password is stored only as an Argon2id hash, so we never see the cleartext), and two-factor authentication settings if you turn them on.
  • Staff names, roles, working hours.
  • Client records you enter or import into your own admin.
  • Bank account, ABN, identity-verification documents collected by Stripe Express for the merchant's own Stripe Connect account. Those details are submitted directly to Stripe; AWS does not see or store them.

3.4 Information we collect automatically when you browse

  • Marketplace activity. When a listing is shown to you in search or on a category page, when you click through to it, when you tap its call button, or when you open it from a QR code, we record that event against the listing so the business can see how much interest it is getting. Each record holds the listing, the type of event, the page it happened on, and, for a search, the words you searched for and the location you searched in. It does not hold your name, your IP address, or any identifier that links those events back to you.
  • Booking-funnel analytics. As you move through the booking steps we record which step was reached, keyed to a one-way hashed session identifier derived from your session or from your IP address and browser user agent. The hash cannot be reversed, and we do not store the underlying IP address or user agent on those records.
  • Approximate location. To order results by distance we use the location your browser gives us, and only when you press the "use my location" control or have already granted your browser's location permission to this site. The value is rounded before it is sent, and we do not store it against you. We do not derive your location from your IP address.
  • How you arrived. If you reach a booking page from a QR code, a social link, a campaign link or a referral link, we keep a short-lived first-party cookie so the resulting booking can be attributed to that source. See section 13.
  • Standard server logs, including IP address, for security, rate limiting and fault diagnosis.

4. Why we collect it

Under APP 3, we only collect personal information that is reasonably necessary for, or directly related to, one or more of our functions. We use the information described above to:

  • Confirm and manage your booking with the Merchant.
  • Send transactional emails, including booking confirmations, calendar attachments, payment receipts, reminders, waitlist offers, and cancellations.
  • Allow the Merchant to view, reschedule, or cancel your booking from their admin dashboard.
  • Run your Pet Pro's account, including sign-in, saved cards, favourites and booking history.
  • Publish reviews you choose to write, and let the business reply to them.
  • Process payments via Stripe Connect. Payments for a booking are direct charges: the funds flow from your card to the Merchant's own Stripe account, and AWS does not take, hold, or route that money. Where you pay with a saved card, we use a Stripe Customer record held on our own Stripe account to make that card available at checkout.
  • Keep an audit trail of payment events for the Merchant's tax records and dispute resolution.
  • Show businesses how many people saw and clicked their listing, and show us which booking steps people drop out at, so we can fix them.
  • Send you marketing messages only where you have asked for them, as described in section 10.
  • Operate, secure, and improve the Platform, including detecting fraud and abuse.
  • Meet our legal obligations, for example responding to lawful requests from regulators.

5. How we notify you (APP 5)

This Privacy Policy is the primary notice of collection. The collection form on the booking page also identifies the Merchant you are booking with and links back here. If you do not wish to provide information that is marked optional, such as email or phone, you may leave those fields blank. Your booking will still be accepted, but the Merchant may have no way to contact you and we cannot send you a confirmation, a reminder, or a receipt.

6. Disclosure to third parties

We share personal information only with the following service providers, and only to the extent necessary to operate the Platform:

  • Stripe, Inc. (payment processing, Stripe Connect, Stripe Express onboarding, and saved cards). Stripe's own scripts run on our payment pages so that your card details never reach our servers. Stripe is based in the United States; some Stripe processing occurs in the US. This is a cross-border disclosure under APP 8.
  • Google LLC. We use the Gmail API on Google Workspace to send our outbound email, so message metadata and bodies pass through Google servers, which may be located outside Australia. Google is separately involved if you choose to sign in with Google, in which case Google confirms your email address to us.
  • Apple Inc. and Meta Platforms, Inc. (the Facebook group), if you choose to sign in with Apple or with Facebook. In each case the provider confirms a verified email address and a stable account identifier to us, and the provider will know that you signed in to Pet Pro's. Both are based in the United States. If you would rather they did not, use email sign-in instead.
  • Cloudflare, Inc. (R2 object storage, used for our nightly encrypted database backups). This site is served directly from our host and does not pass through Cloudflare's network. Backup copies are stored in Cloudflare R2 using Cloudflare's Asia-Pacific region. We have not applied a jurisdiction restriction, so we do not promise that backup copies never leave Australia.
  • Fly.io, Inc. (Platform hosting). The Platform runs in Fly's Sydney (SYD) region; the database file lives on a Sydney-region volume.
  • Mobile Message Pty Ltd (Australian SMS delivery). Booking SMS is not switched on for Pet Pro's. The one exception is the verification code we text a business owner who is claiming their listing, which is sent through a number shared with our sister booking marketplace, operated by the same company.
  • Anthropic PBC, which provides the AI models behind our drafting tools. A business owner can ask us to draft a message to a client, in which case the client's first name and the appointment details are sent to Anthropic; to read a service menu they have uploaded as an image or PDF; and to answer questions about their own business set-up, in which case service and staff records are sent. We also use the same service to draft the descriptive text on unclaimed listings from publicly available business information. Anthropic is based in the United States. These drafting features are switched on in production today. The AI receptionist described in section 9 is a separate feature and remains switched off until a Merchant turns it on.
  • The Merchant you book with. Booking records you submit are visible to that Merchant's owner, managers, and rostered staff within the Platform's admin surface.
  • The public. Reviews you publish, including your first name, last initial, rating, comments and photos, are visible to anyone who visits the listing.
  • Law-enforcement and regulators, where disclosure is required or authorised by Australian law.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share data with advertising networks or data brokers. There is no Google Analytics, no advertising pixel, no tag manager and no third-party analytics tracker anywhere on this site. Our own analytics are first-party only, as described in section 3.4. The only third-party code that runs in your browser on this site is Stripe's, on the payment pages.

7. Cross-border disclosure (APP 8)

As noted above, Stripe, Google, Apple, Meta and Anthropic process some data in the United States, and Cloudflare is a global service operated by a US company. By using the Platform you acknowledge and consent to those overseas disclosures. We take reasonable steps to ensure that overseas recipients handle your information in a manner consistent with the APPs, including by using providers that publish their own equivalent privacy programs and, where available, standard contractual clauses.

8. Security (APP 11)

  • All traffic to the Platform is served over HTTPS / TLS.
  • Owner passwords are hashed with Argon2id, so we never store or log the cleartext, and business accounts can add two-factor authentication.
  • Session tokens stored in the database are themselves hashed; the cookie value is the only place the raw token exists.
  • The admin surface is gated by either operator HTTP Basic Authentication or an owner session cookie.
  • Card payment data is handled entirely by Stripe's Payment Element, so we are out of scope for PCI-DSS storage requirements because we never receive the card number.
  • The production database lives on a Sydney-region volume, and a copy is uploaded nightly to Cloudflare R2, which encrypts objects at rest by default.

9. Retention

Some records are deleted or de-identified automatically on a fixed schedule. Those schedules are:

  • Booking-funnel analytics: deleted after 90 days.
  • Marketplace listing events (the impressions, clicks, call taps and QR scans described in section 3.4, including any search words attached to them): the individual records are deleted after 14 days. A daily count per listing survives, and those counts hold no information about any individual.
  • AI receptionist call data. This feature is not switched on today and no calls are being answered. If a Merchant turns it on, the call transcript is deleted and the caller's phone number and name are blanked after 90 days by default, or after the shorter period that Merchant sets. Non-identifying fields such as call duration and outcome are kept for billing.
  • In-app notifications: deleted 60 days after being read, or 180 days if never read.
  • Webhook delivery records and server error logs: deleted after 30 days.
  • Rate-limiting records: deleted after two hours.
  • Sign-in sessions: customer sessions expire after 90 days and business sessions after 14 days, and the expired rows, including the IP address and browser user agent captured with them, are deleted.

Everything else is retained until it is no longer needed or until deletion is requested. That includes booking records, account records, reviews, credit and pack records, payment audit entries, message and send logs, and the sign-in audit log. If a Merchant deactivates their profile, their booking data is hidden from public surfaces but retained in the database for record-keeping and potential reactivation; we will purge it on request.

Nightly backups are a separate copy and are not covered by the schedules above. Deleting something from the live Platform does not immediately remove it from a backup already taken. Nightly backup copies are deleted automatically 90 days after they are written, under a lifecycle rule on the bucket. Fly volume snapshots are kept for 5 days.

10. Email and SMS communications (Spam Act 2003)

Messages we send you about a specific booking, including confirmations, calendar attachments, payment receipts, reminders, waitlist offers, cancellation notices and sign-in links, are transactional messages and are not commercial electronic messages under the Spam Act 2003 (Cth). They do not carry an unsubscribe link by design. To stop receiving them you can cancel the underlying appointment using the link in the confirmation email, turn reminders off in your account, or contact the Merchant directly.

We also send messages that are marketing, and we send those only where you have asked for them. They include a "we miss you" note if you have not been back for a while, an alert when a last-minute opening comes up at a business you asked to hear from, a request for a review after a visit, and any campaign a business sends to its own client list. Marketing SMS is not switched on for Pet Pro's. If it is turned on in future, it will go only to people who have specifically agreed to SMS offers, and every such SMS will carry "Reply STOP to opt out".

You control all of this from /account, where you can turn off marketing email, reminder email and nudge email separately, and turn off last-minute alerts for each business. Every marketing email carries a one-click unsubscribe link that works without signing in, in addition to the link to your account settings. Transactional emails about a booking are not marketing and cannot be unsubscribed from.

11. Access and correction (APP 12 & APP 13)

You have a right to ask for a copy of the personal information we hold about you, and to ask us to correct anything that is inaccurate, out of date, incomplete, irrelevant, or misleading. Please contact us at support@petpros.com.au. We may need to verify your identity before responding. We aim to respond within 30 days.

If you hold a Pet Pro's account you can delete it yourself from your account page. Deleting your account removes your sign-in details, your social sign-in links, your saved cards, your favourites, your reviews and their photos, and any consultation or intake forms and files held against you. Two things deliberately survive. The bookings you made with a business remain that business's own record of the appointment, in the same form as a guest booking. Our sign-in audit log keeps the email address and IP address of each sign-in attempt, with the link to your account severed, so we can still investigate account takeover and fraud. If you want those removed as well, contact us and we will consider the request.

If your request relates to information a Merchant collected from you, that is, a booking record, we will work with that Merchant to action your request, since the Merchant is the primary controller of that record.

12. Data breach notification

AWS complies with the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme under Part IIIC of the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth). If we become aware of an eligible data breach involving the personal information of identifiable individuals, we will notify the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) and the affected individuals as soon as practicable, and in any event within 30 days, in accordance with the scheme.

13. Cookies

We use only the cookies the Platform needs to work, to remember a choice you made, or to attribute a booking to the link you arrived from. We set no advertising cookies and no cross-site tracking cookies. All of the cookies we set ourselves are first-party. They are:

  • __bookings_owner_session and __bookings_customer_session and __bookings_partner_session are your signed-in session tokens, for a business account, a customer account and a partner account respectively. HttpOnly, SameSite=Lax, Secure in production.
  • __bookings_op_mode is a short-lived marker used by the operator entry flow. 60-second lifetime.
  • __bookings_oauth_flow holds the one-time security value that protects a Google, Apple or Facebook sign-in from being tampered with. It lasts only as long as that sign-in.
  • __bookings_fav_hint and __bookings_next_hint remember what you were doing before you were asked to sign in, so you land back in the right place.
  • aws_book_return remembers the website URL you came from, so the confirmation page can show a "Return to (Business)" button. Scoped to a single booking path; 1-hour lifetime.
  • pp_book_src and aws_book_ref record which link or QR code brought you to a booking page, so the booking can be attributed to it. Both are first-party, HttpOnly, scoped to that one booking path, and expire after 1 hour. They are not used to build a profile of you or to follow you to other sites.
  • bd_ref records that you arrived through one of our referral partners, so the partner can be credited if you sign up. This is the longest-lived cookie we set, at 60 days, and it is site-wide rather than scoped to one page. It holds a partner code only, not an identifier for you.
  • aws_calendar_view remembers the default calendar view inside a business's own admin.

On the payment pages, Stripe sets its own cookies from its own domain for fraud prevention: __stripe_mid, which persists for one year, and __stripe_sid, which lasts 30 minutes. We do not control them and cannot read them. Stripe describes them in its own privacy policy and cookie notice.

We also use a small amount of browser storage, which is not a cookie but is worth disclosing. aws_cookie_ack_v1 remembers that you dismissed the cookie notice, and pp_copilot_v1 holds a business owner's own admin assistant conversation for the length of the browser tab. Apart from the assistant conversation, which is sent to Anthropic as described in section 6 when the owner continues it, these stay in your browser and are never sent to us.

14. Children

The Platform is intended for adults. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under the age of 16. If you believe a child has provided personal information to us, please contact us and we will delete the record.

15. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time, for example when we introduce a new service provider or a new regulatory requirement applies. Material changes will be reflected in the "Last updated" date at the top of this page. Continued use of the Platform after a change constitutes acceptance of the updated policy.

16. Complaints

If you believe AWS has breached the APPs in handling your personal information, please contact us first at support@petpros.com.au so we can try to resolve the issue. If you are not satisfied with our response, you may complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC):

17. Contact

Privacy questions, access requests, correction requests, deletion requests, requests to remove an unclaimed listing, and complaints should be addressed to: support@petpros.com.au.