Academy of Audio

Privacy Policy

Draft v0.1 · not yet in force

This policy explains what personal information the Academy of Audio collects, how we use it, and your choices. It is a working draft and will be finalised with legal review to align with the Australian Privacy Principles.

What we collect

• Account details — your name, email, password (hashed), and date of birth / age confirmation.
• Profile & content — anything you add to your profile, and the posts, replies and files you share in the community.
• Payment information — handled by our payment processor (Stripe). We don't store your card number; we keep a record of your subscription and invoices.
• Usage & device data — basic logs and cookies needed to run and secure the service, plus website analytics on our public pages (see Analytics and cookies below).

How we use it

• To provide your account, courses, tools, and the community forum.
• To process payments and manage your subscription (via Stripe, incl. tax).
• To keep the community safe — moderation, handling reports, and enforcing the guidelines.
• To contact you about your account, and (if you opt in) about the Academy.

Sharing

We don't sell your personal information. We share it only with service providers who help us run the platform (such as Stripe for payments, Google for website analytics, and our hosting and email providers), and where required by law or to respond to regulators such as the eSafety Commissioner.

Some of these providers store and process data outside Australia, including in the United States. We take reasonable steps to ensure they handle it consistently with this policy. [Overseas-transfer disclosures under Australian Privacy Principle 8 to be confirmed with legal counsel.]

Retention, moderation & deletion

You can request deletion of your account. When you do, your community posts are anonymised rather than removed so other members' conversations stay intact. Where required for safety or legal reasons, we may retain reported or moderated content and moderation records as evidence, even after a deletion request. Reporter identities are kept confidential from the reported member.

Analytics and cookies

We use Google Analytics to understand how people find and use our public pages: which pages get read, roughly where visitors are (from their IP address), what device and browser they use, and whether they arrived from a search, a link or an email. Google acts as our service provider for this and stores the data outside Australia, including in the United States.

Analytics runs on our public pages only. It is not loaded once you are signed in, so your work inside the Academy, including your projects, clients, estimates and financial figures, is never sent to an analytics provider.

We use this to see what is worth writing more of, not to identify you. We do not sell it and we do not combine it with your account.

You can opt out by blocking cookies in your browser, using private browsing, or installing Google's own opt-out add-on. Blocking analytics does not affect your access to anything on the site.

[Consent requirements for visitors in the EU and UK to be confirmed with legal counsel. Australian law does not currently require a cookie banner for analytics of this kind.]

Your choices

You can access and update your details from your account settings, unsubscribe from marketing email, and request a copy or deletion of your data by contacting us. [Australian Privacy Principles rights, complaints handling, and any overseas-transfer disclosures — to be confirmed with legal counsel.]

Contact

Questions or a privacy request? Reach us via our contact page.