BETAlast update deployed 10 July 2026, 08:20 pm
CouncilTracer

Privacy policy

CouncilTracer answers questions about City of Mitcham's public record. This page explains, in plain language, what information we collect about you when you use it, why, where it goes, and what you can do about it. CouncilTracer is currently an invite-only beta— some of what's described here is a deliberate beta arrangement that will be tightened before any wider release.

Who we are

CouncilTracer is built and operated by Darren Kruse (Kruse Legal), Adelaide, South Australia. For anything in this policy — questions, corrections, deletion requests — email darren@kruselegal.com.au.

What we collect

  • Your account.When you sign in with Microsoft (or, when enabled, Google or Facebook) we receive and store your email address, display name, and the provider's internal account identifier. We never see or store a password. We also record your account tier and when you last signed in.
  • Your questions and the answers, during the beta.We store the full text of the questions you ask and the answers you receive, along with which source documents each answer cited. This is disclosed next to the ask box. It exists so we can check answer quality and find gaps in the document corpus while the service is tested. Please don't include personal information — names, addresses, phone numbers — in your questions.
  • Feedback. If you rate an answer (thumbs up/down) we store the rating and any comment you type, linked to the answer it describes.
  • Timeline reports. Reports you create are stored (title, report text, and the source list) so you can come back to them.
  • Usage telemetry.We record how long searches take, whether they succeed, and the system's internal interpretation of each question (search terms and filters) — for performance and quality monitoring.
  • Cookies. A sign-in session cookie, plus two small preference cookies: ct_welcomed(you've seen the welcome page) and ct_prefs(interface preferences, e.g. “don't ask me again” choices). Your light/dark theme choice stays in your browser's local storage and is never sent to us. There are no analytics or advertising trackers of any kind.
  • Legacy document-request form. An older feature recorded an email address and IP address with each request; it is being retired. The chat service does not log IP addresses.

Why we collect it

To answer your questions; to apply fair-use daily limits; to see, during the beta, whether answers are actually good and where the document corpus has gaps; and to keep the service fast and working. Nothing is collected for advertising, profiling, or resale — we never sell or trade your information, and no advertiser, analytics company, or data broker receives anything.

Where your information goes

CouncilTracer runs on infrastructure providers who process data on our behalf:

  • An LLM provider (currently via OpenRouter). To generate an answer, your question text and excerpts of the (already public) council documents are sent to a large-language-model provider. This is inherent to how the service works — it is the main reason not to put personal information in a question.
  • Cloudflare.Hosts the application, computes search embeddings of your question (Workers AI), and stores the council's public PDFs (R2).
  • Supabase.The database that holds everything listed under “What we collect”.
  • Your sign-in provider (Microsoft, and when enabled Google or Facebook) — used only to prove who you are; we don't post to, read from, or otherwise touch your account.

How long we keep it

Beta arrangement: information collected during the beta is retained for the duration of the beta. Before any public release, we will review everything collected — including whether it is deleted, anonymised, or kept — and an automated personal-information-stripping filter will be put in place before question or answer text is written to storage. This policy will be updated when that happens.

Your choices

  • Don't include personal information in questions — the ask box reminds you.
  • Email darren@kruselegal.com.au to see what we hold about you, correct it, or have it deleted — during the beta this is a manual process and we'll turn it around promptly.
  • You can stop using the service at any time; on request we'll delete your account row and your logged questions, answers, feedback and reports.

Changes to this policy

Updates are posted on this page with a new date; material changes will be flagged in the app. See also our scraping & transparency policy for how the underlying council documents are collected.

Last updated: 10 July 2026.