What HWD collects when you design a home with it, why we need each piece, where it is kept, and what you can ask us to do with it.
HWD is operated by HWD-Builds, ABN 73 151 582 872, of Queensland, Australia ("HWD", "we", "us"). "You" is the person using it.
We're the entity responsible for the personal information described here. Contact us any time through our contact page.
We handle personal information in line with the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles.
This covers hwdbuilds.com and the HWD Studio — the site, your account, the homes you design, the plans you upload and the cost figures that come out.
It sits alongside our Terms of Service, which govern how the product may be used. Where the terms talk about privacy, this is the document they mean.
It doesn't cover other people's sites we link to, or what a builder, designer or certifier does with a design after you send it to them. Once you share something of yours with someone else, their handling of it is between you and them.
Only these things, and each for a reason you can see:
| What | When |
|---|---|
| Your email address | When you create an account. It's your username, and the only way we can reach you. |
| A password, stored as a one-way hash | If you sign up with email rather than Google. We never see or store the password itself and cannot recover it for you. |
| Your Google display name and profile picture | Only if you choose to sign in with Google. See section 6. |
| Your project — the words you write about the home you want, the answers you give, the plans HWD draws, rooms you lay out, materials, the suburb or postcode you name, and the cost figures produced | As you work. It saves itself so the design is there next time, on any device you sign in from. |
| Files you upload — floorplans, sketches, photographs, builder quotes | Only when you upload one. See section 7. |
| Ordinary server records — IP address, browser type, time of request, page or file requested | Automatically, by our hosting provider, as part of serving the site and defending it from abuse. |
| Anything you write to us | When you write to us through the contact page — your name, email address, your phone number if you give it, and your message. |
We collect it from you directly, except the Google details (from Google, with your permission) and the server records (automatically).
You don't have to give us a real name, and we don't ask for one. HWD works with an email address and nothing more.
It's worth being specific, because most sites can't say this:
Each piece does a job:
We don't use your designs to advertise to you, and we don't use them to train our own models.
If we ever want to use de-identified figures from your project to improve HWD's cost data, we'll ask you first and you can say no — that's section 15 of the Terms.
Google sign-in is optional. Email and a password do exactly the same job.
If you use it, HWD asks Google for three things only: your email address, your basic profile (display name and profile picture) and confirmation that you are who Google says you are. That's the whole request.
We don't ask for, and cannot see, your Gmail, your contacts, your calendar, your Drive or anything else in your Google account. You can review or withdraw HWD's access any time at myaccount.google.com/permissions — though withdrawing it while it's your only sign-in method will lock you out of HWD, so set a password first.
Signing in with Google at an address that already has an HWD password account joins them into the one account, because the email address is confirmed as the same.
Uploads go into private storage, in a folder named with your account's id. The storage rules only permit that folder to be read by that account. They aren't public, they aren't listed, and they aren't indexed by search engines.
We use them to trace your plan into something you can work with, and to read figures out of a quote. Nothing else.
Two things worth knowing before you upload:
Keep your own copies. HWD is a design tool, not a document archive.
This is the part people most want a straight answer on, so here it is.
Most of HWD never leaves your device. Our engine that sizes and draws your home, the model you walk through, the materials and the cost figures are ours, and they run in your browser.
A handful of specific jobs, all of them about reading, are done by a service provider working for us: reading your words into a brief, writing the questions your words left open, suggesting an arrangement of rooms for the engine to draw, reading an uploaded plan or a builder's quote, and turning a plain-language change into an edit. For those, and only those, the relevant text or image is sent from our server to that provider, in the United States, processed, and the answer sent back.
What gets sent is the material that job needs — the sentence you wrote, the brief, the room layout, or the page you uploaded. Your email address is not sent with it.
The provider processes it on our behalf under its commercial terms, and your content is not used to train its models.
Under Australian Privacy Principle 8, sending personal information overseas is a disclosure we have to tell you about, and this section is that disclosure. By using those features you agree to it. The rest of HWD — your account, your saved project, your files — stays in Australia.
If you'd rather nothing went overseas, you can still use the Studio: choose your own answers instead of asking HWD to read them, and don't upload a plan for tracing.
We're a small operation and we use established providers rather than running our own machines. Each one only gets what it needs to do its job.
| Provider | What it does, and where |
|---|---|
| Accounts and storage | Your account, your saved projects and your uploaded files. The database and storage sit in Sydney, Australia. The provider is a US company, so its staff may access the infrastructure from overseas for support and maintenance. |
| Hosting | Serves the site and runs the small functions that pass work to the reading service and send the contact form. Global network; ordinary server records including IP addresses. |
| Reading service | The jobs described in section 8. United States. |
| Only if you choose Google sign-in, and only to confirm who you are. | |
| Our email provider | Sends the codes that confirm an address or reset a password. It sees your email address and the code. |
| Contact form delivery | Delivers what you send through the contact page to our inbox. It sees your name, email address, phone number if given, and your message. United States. |
We may also disclose information where the law requires it — a court order, a regulator, or a genuine emergency involving someone's safety. If that ever happens and we're allowed to tell you, we will.
If HWD is ever sold or merged, your information may transfer with it. You'd be told before anything changed, and this policy would keep applying until you were told otherwise.
Your account, your projects and your uploads live in Sydney, Australia.
We keep them while your account is open, because that's the point — your home is there when you come back. If you ask us to delete the account, we remove your projects and your files, other than anything we're legally required to keep (tax records, for instance) and anything you've already contributed as de-identified data.
Server records are kept only as long as our host keeps them for security and diagnostics.
An account that's been inactive for a long time may be removed after we email the address on it and give you a reasonable chance to say you still want it.
No system is perfectly secure, and we won't pretend otherwise. Use a password you don't use anywhere else, and tell us straight away if you think your account has been reached by someone else.
You can ask us to:
Write to us through our contact page, using the email address on the account. We'll reply within 5 business days and act within 30 days. It's free — if a request were ever unusually large we'd tell you the cost before doing anything, and never charge for simply asking.
We might need to confirm it's really you before handing over a copy or deleting an account. That's to protect you, not to slow you down.
If we refuse a request — which would be rare, and only where the law allows — we'll tell you why in writing and how to have it reviewed.
If personal information is lost or reached by someone who shouldn't have it, and it's likely to cause you serious harm, we'll notify you and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner as the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme requires.
We'll tell you what happened, what was involved, and what to do about it — plainly, and without waiting for the story to look better.
HWD is for adults planning a home, and the Terms require you to be at least 18. We don't knowingly collect information from children. If you believe a child has created an account, tell us through our contact page and we'll remove it.
We'll update this as HWD changes — a new provider, a new feature, a new kind of information. If a change materially affects how we handle what we already hold, we'll tell you by email or in the product before it takes effect.
The version and date at the top of this page always show what's current.
If you think we've mishandled your personal information, tell us what happened through our contact page. We'll acknowledge it within 5 business days and give you a written answer within 30 days.
If you're not satisfied with how we deal with it, you can take it to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner: