Privacy policy

FOCUp is operated by Fix Our Country Up, a registered business name, based in Victoria, Australia. “FOCUp” is simply the short form of that name and means the same thing throughout this site. Fix Our Country Up collects, holds and is answerable for the information described on this page.

For anything about your information — what we hold, correcting it, deleting it — write to privacy@focup.au. That address reaches the person responsible, not a queue.

You can open any budget, move every line and see your score without giving us anything. No account, no tracker, no cookie banner to click through in a rage. Saving a budget so you get a share link is the one thing that asks for an email address. If you save one we store the numbers you moved — not you — and we use your address to send you your copy and then throw it away. We only keep it if you separately ask for updates, and then it lives in its own table with no way of reaching any budget, including yours.

We know what a site about politics could do with this data. We have gone out of our way to make sure we cannot.

Nothing, while you are just using it

Moving the sliders happens entirely in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere until you press Save.

A budget, if you save one

The percentage change you made to each line, and the title you typed. The title is used in the subject line of the copy emailed to you and is shown on no public page. No name is attached, and no account is created.

Your email address — and normally we do not keep it

Saving asks for an address, because saving is what produces your share link and the copy we send you. We use it to send that copy and then discard it: no row is written, so there is nothing to disclose later and nothing to delete. The only exception is if you tick the second box asking for updates — we cannot send those without keeping your address, so in that case it is stored in its own table with the consent you gave and the version of this policy you gave it under. That box is never required and you get your budget either way.

Your IP address, briefly

Held for a few minutes in a rate-limiting counter so one machine cannot flood the save endpoint. It expires on its own and is never written to the database.

A tick in a tally, when you save

Saving a budget adds one to a counter for each line — raised, cut, or left alone — which is what the Pulse page is built from. Your particular combination of choices is never written down, so the tally can say how many people raised health and can never say which of them also cut defence. There is no person in it at all.

Two things are kept in your browser and never sent to us: your light or dark theme choice, and the list of budgets you have saved on this device, which is what marks a leaderboard row as yours. Clearing your browser data removes both. We set no advertising or tracking cookies.

You can build and score a budget without telling us anything at all — no account, and nothing leaves your browser until you press Save.

Saving one does ask for an email address, because saving is what produces a share link and a copy sent to you. An address is not a name and we never ask for one: no account is created and nothing is verified.

And unless you ask for updates, we do not keep it. The address is used to send you your budget and then discarded — no row is written at all. If you do tick the updates box we have to keep it, because there is no way to send you something later without it, and you can unsubscribe from any email in one click.

If you would rather give us nothing, do not save. Everything on the page — every figure, every consequence, your score — is already in front of you, and the link in your browser’s address bar reopens your budget exactly as you left it. Bookmark that and you have kept your own copy without us holding anything.

• We do not store your email address against your budget. They live in separate tables with no key joining them, and a test in the codebase fails the build if anyone adds one.
• We do not store which party your budget resembles. That comparison is calculated while the results page renders and then discarded.
• We run no advertising, no analytics product and no third-party script. There is no Google Analytics, no pixel, and no cookie banner because there is nothing to consent to.
• We do not sell, rent or share personal information with anyone for their own use.
• We do not ask your age, your postcode, your gender or how you vote.

Which parts of a budget a person would cut says something about their politics. Under the Privacy Act 1988, information about someone's political opinions is sensitive information and is held to a higher standard than an ordinary contact detail — including when it is inferred rather than asked for.

FOCUp's answer is not to promise we will be careful with the combination. It is to make the combination impossible to assemble: the address and the budget are never written down together, so there is no query that returns both.

A share link shows your score out of 100 and which budget it was scored against. It does not show what you changed, the title you gave it, or which party your budget resembles. The preview image that chat apps generate from the link shows the same thing.

The leaderboard shows scores only. There are no names on it, and your own entries are marked using a list kept in your browser that we never receive.

The Pulse reports what people do to the budget in aggregate: the share of saved budgets that raised each line, and the average change. It is built from the counters described above and contains no person, so there is nothing in it that could be traced to you.

One consequence worth being straight about: because a counter is a running total with no record of who contributed, deleting your budget does not subtract it from the tally. There is nothing there to delete — no row is yours — but the arithmetic does not run backwards either.

Supabase

Hosts the database. Data is stored in their infrastructure.

Resend

Sends the email you asked for. They receive your address and the message.

Our hosting provider

Serves the site and keeps short-lived server logs, as every web host does.

The database is in Sydney. Budgets and email addresses are stored in Australia, in Supabase's ap-southeast-2 region.

The exception is email itself. When you ask for a copy of your budget, your address and that message are handed to Resend, which operates in the United States — so that one address is handled overseas at the moment it is sent. Our hosting provider also keeps short-lived server logs, as every web host does. We use each provider for the purpose above and nothing else, and we do not authorise any of them to use your information for their own.

The database is hosted by Supabase in Sydney and reachable only with credentials held by the operator; it is not exposed to the public internet. The site is served over HTTPS. Addresses are stored in a table with no key to any budget, which means a breach of it would disclose addresses and consent records and nothing about anyone's politics.

No system is beyond compromise. If information we hold is lost or disclosed in a way likely to cause you serious harm, we will tell you and, where the law requires it, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.

Your email address

Deleted 24 months after we last heard from you, or as soon as you ask — whichever comes first. Unsubscribing stops the email; asking us to delete removes the record.

Consent records

Kept as long as the address is, because a record of what you agreed to is only useful alongside the thing you agreed about.

A saved budget

Kept until you ask us to remove it. It is not connected to you, so there is nothing in it to expire.

The rate-limiting record of your IP

Minutes. It expires on its own.

You can ask what we hold about your address, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. Write to privacy@focup.au and we will respond within 30 days.

To stop emails immediately, use the unsubscribe link at the bottom of any message. It needs no login and takes one click.

Because budgets are stored without any link to you, we cannot look one up from your email address — we would need the share link. That is the cost of the separation, and we think it is the right way round.

FOCUp is not aimed at children. Anyone can use the budget simulator — it asks for nothing — but we do not knowingly keep an email address from someone under 15. If you believe we hold one, tell us and we will delete it.

FOCUp is a small operation, and under the Privacy Act 1988 a business turning over less than $3 million a year is not bound by the Australian Privacy Principles. We are telling you that rather than letting you assume otherwise.

We follow them anyway, and this page is written to that standard — what we collect, why, how long we keep it, how to get it back and how to have it erased. The difference is that today these are commitments we have made to you rather than obligations a regulator enforces on us. If FOCUp grows past the threshold, or we choose to opt in to being covered, this section will say so.

Tell us at privacy@focup.au. We will acknowledge it within 5 business days and answer it within 30, and if we have got something wrong we will fix it and say what we changed.

Because of the exemption above, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner cannot currently take a complaint about us — so we are not going to send you there and waste your time. If that changes, this page changes with it.

If what we collect or why changes, this page gets a new version number and anyone whose consent was recorded under the old one is asked again. Version numbers are not bumped for typos.