Your privacy, in plain words

You do not have to give us any personal information to come to a Bring Your Bills event. Just turn up. This page explains, in plain words, what we ask for, why we ask, and what we do with it.

If you tell us you're coming

There's a form on this website called "Let us know you're coming". It's completely optional. It just helps us work out how many staff and interpreters to book. You are just as welcome if you never fill it in.

• Your name, phone, email and postcode are all optional. You can tell us you're coming without giving any of them.
• If you give us your postcode, it's only ever used to see which areas people are travelling from for planning and funder reporting, not to look up an event near you (there's a separate, anonymous postcode search for that on the calendar page).
• If you do give us your phone number or email and tick the box that says we can contact you, we may send you a message about upcoming Bring Your Bills events. That's the only reason we'd use it.
• If you don't tick that box, we won't contact you about future events at all.
• You can change your mind any time. Email byb@secl.org.au and say "please stop contacting me", and we will.
• What you tell us about the kind of help you need (energy, water, phone, or not sure) helps us invite the right services. It's a short tick-list, not a form about your money situation.
• Only SECL staff see any of this. It never goes on the website.

What we write down on the day

So we can keep these events running and show the people who fund us that they work, the workers who help you write down a short note about the kind of help you got, for example "help with an energy bill", or "referred to a lawyer". It's a tick-list on a phone or tablet, and it takes about twenty seconds.

• It has no name, phone number, address, or bills in it. Nobody reading it later can tell it was you.
• You can ask the worker not to write anything down. Just say so. You'll get exactly the same help either way, it makes no difference to us.
• We use it to count how many people we helped and with what, so we can plan the next event and report to our funder.
• If you'd rather ask about this in person, the concierge desk at the front of any event can explain it.

The check-in form, when you arrive

Some events use a short form on arrival (reached by a QR code, not linked from this website's home page) to help work out who can best help you. It's completely optional, you're just as welcome if you never fill it in, and there's no name field on it at all.

• No name, and no contact detail of any kind. Unlike the survey below, there's genuinely nowhere on this form to give one.
• Your answers (household size, what you need help with, a stress rating, housing and postcode) help staff connect you with the right person today, and feed into reporting to our funders.
• Kept indefinitely, the same as the on-the-day survey above, because it never identifies anyone in the first place.
• Only SECL staff see any of this. It never goes on the website.

The survey, on your way out

Some events also have a short survey on the way out (again, a QR code rather than anything linked from this website), asking how the event went for you. Completely optional.

• No name is ever asked. The only field that could identify you is a phone number or email, and only if you tick that you'd like us to follow up with you or share your story as a testimonial — leave that unticked and there is nothing personal in your answers at all.
• If you do give us a phone number or email for a follow-up, it's cleared from our records after 18 months. Your other answers (how the event went, what could improve) are kept for reporting, the same as the on-the-day survey above.
• Only SECL staff see any of this. It never goes on the website.

Who can see your information

• SECL staff: the people organising the event.
• The worker who helps you, and their own organisation, for the note described above.
• Nobody else. We don't sell it, we don't advertise with it, and we don't hand it to anyone who isn't helping you.

Like most websites, ours runs on services other companies provide, the website itself is hosted by companies called Netlify and GitHub, and everything you send through a form goes straight to a company called Supabase, on computers in Sydney, and is stored there. Our map page loads its map pictures from OpenStreetMap, which means they can see the internet address of anyone looking at the map. And when a new event is added to our calendar, we send the event's venue address, the hall or library, never anything about you, to OpenStreetMap's address lookup, which runs overseas, to place the pin on our map.

How long we keep it

• Your name and contact details: deleted automatically once you haven't been to one of our events for 5 years. If you keep coming along, we keep them, so we're not asking you for the same details over and over.
• The anonymous note from the day: the written comments are cleared after about 18 months. The plain counts are kept longer for reporting, but there's nothing in them that points to you.
• Ask us sooner if you like. Email byb@secl.org.au and we'll delete your details straight away, without waiting.

Your choices, any time

Email byb@secl.org.au or ask at the concierge desk, and you can:

• See what we hold about you.
• Fix anything that's wrong.
• Have it deleted.
• Tell us to stop contacting you.

You don't need to give a reason, and it will never affect the help you get.

BYB Helper (the chat bubble)

There's a chat bubble in the corner of most pages, called BYB Helper, that can answer questions about this website and how the events work. It's run by artificial intelligence, so it can get things wrong, and it isn't a person.

• It's the one part of this site that sends what you type overseas. Your question is answered by a company called Anthropic, in the United States. Everything else you type into this website stays in Australia.
• So please don't type personal details into it, no name, phone number, address, or account or reference numbers.
• We check for those before anything is sent. If your message looks like it has an email address, phone number, street address or a long account number in it, it is stopped here in Australia and never sent. You'll be asked to try again without it. That check catches obvious things, but it can't catch everything. For example, it can't tell that "my landlord is evicting me" is about you. That's why the warning above matters.
• Nothing is kept. We don't store your messages, the answers, or anything about who you are. Close the page and the conversation is gone.
• It won't give you advice about your bills, and it's not supposed to. Those questions need a real person: the assistant will point you to one.
• You never have to use it. Everything on this site works without it.

No tracking

This website has no accounts and no advertising trackers. We don't use cookies to follow you around the internet. We do count how often buttons like "Get directions" get clicked, so we know which parts of the site are useful. That's a count only, with nothing about who clicked.

If you're a service or partner organisation

If you register your service to attend an event, we keep your name, organisation, email and (if you give it) mobile so we can organise the day with you. Your organisation's name, logo and "how we can help" summary appear on this website's public event listing, email us if you'd like them changed or taken down. Your own contact details are never published. Full details are in the providers & partners guide.

You can also give us hardship contacts for your organisation, a phone number and email we can pass on when someone needs your service on a day you're not at an event. These are optional, they're meant to be your team's published contacts rather than anyone's personal ones, and they're shown only to SECL staff and to other services signed in with their own code. They are not published on this website. You can change or clear them yourself at any time from your profile in the staff & partner hub.