Home/Contacts policy
Business contacts only.
BuildsConnect serves the professionals a project has already put on the public record: the planner, architect or engineer named as its point of contact. It does not serve homeowners’ personal details, and the wall that enforces that is built into the database, not just the application code. This page states the mechanisms.
Figures last refreshed 3 August 2026.
What we serve
Contacts the public record itself states.
When a DA is lodged in NSW, the accompanying Statement of Environmental Effects carries a council-mandated point-of-contact block: the professional handling the application. Our extraction is strictly extractive: it reads only what the document states, and never infers, matches or looks a contact up elsewhere. Every row records its basis: the stated-contact block, the author’s signature block, or the title-page attribution (“prepared by X for Y”).
The roles served are consultants and companies acting in trade capacity: planners, architects, engineers, surveyors, certifiers, quantity surveyors, arborists, heritage consultants, and applicants only where there is evidence they are acting as a business (a company name or business email on the record). A bare private-person applicant is filtered out.
Coverage is honest: not every SEE names a direct phone or email, so every payload reports its own coverage rather than implying completeness. Currently 1,548 projects carry at least one contact of record (2,557 contact rows); 755 rows carry a direct phone and 841 an email address we serve you, and both counts grow weekly. Of those addresses, 462 have been confirmed deliverable by independent verification; the rest are shown to you labelled as unchecked, because unchecked means we have not got to it, not that it is bad. The one class we withhold is an address verification checked and found undeliverable. The absence of a contact row is not evidence a project has none.
What we never serve
Owner personal details: excluded at the database layer.
Planning documents sometimes name the private property owner. Those details never reach the product, and the exclusion is structural. Three mechanisms, each of which would have to fail independently:
- The customer-facing database role cannot read the raw extraction table. Raw document extractions live on a worker-only plane of the database; the role every customer-facing surface connects through has no read permission on it. The database itself returns permission-denied. This is not application-code discipline.
- The serving view structurally excludes owners. The only surface customer queries can reach is a database view whose definition excludes
role='owner'rows and bare private-person applicants. A row the view excludes does not exist as far as any customer query is concerned. - The API rejects
role=ownerat the boundary. A request for owner contacts returns an explicit error, documented as a product guarantee, not an empty result that invites retrying.
The same structure protects the owner-resolution working data elsewhere in the platform (the structured contact tables the operator works in are likewise unreadable by the customer-facing database role), and the public map and dashboards render project locations (public DA-record data), never contact details.
If you are a listed business contact and would prefer your details not to appear, email todd@buildsconnect.com.au and we will remove them.
Privacy & anti-spam posture
What the system does, stated plainly.
Rather than assert a legal conclusion, here is what the system actually does:
- Unsubscribe on every alert email. Every alert and digest email carries a one-tap, login-free unsubscribe link. Unsubscribing records a withdrawal against the address itself, so sends to that address stop across the platform, not just for one watch.
- Consent-first capture. Alerts go only to people who created an account and set up a watch themselves. The early-access form collects only what you type into it, and we contact you about BuildsConnect only.
- Aggregate-only public stats. Public pages (including this one) carry counts and percentages queried from the platform, never individual records, never personal details.
- No private-source contact data. Contacts come from the public planning record where a professional is named as a project’s point of contact, not from bought lists, social scraping or data brokers.
This page is a statement of how the system operates, kept current alongside the product. It is not a certification of compliance with the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth), the Australian Privacy Principles or the Spam Act 2003 (Cth). Questions about your obligations when using the data in your own outreach are yours to assess, and our terms require that outreach to comply with applicable law.