Draft, pending legal review. This page has not yet been checked by a lawyer. It may change before it takes effect.

Privacy policy

Last updated 11 November 2026.

Who we are

howdwedo is a service that sends short client satisfaction surveys by email for small service firms. It is run by Plankton Digital Pty Ltd (ACN 600 731 477) as trustee for The Moulton Family Trust (ABN 42 110 801 279), in Victoria, Australia. In this policy, "we" and "us" means Plankton Digital Pty Ltd as trustee for The Moulton Family Trust.

We handle personal information in line with the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles. Questions about this policy go to hello@howdwedo.app.

Two kinds of information, two different roles

Your account. When a firm signs up, we collect details about the firm and the people who use the account. We decide how that information is used, so we are responsible for it.

Your clients' details. A firm uploads details of its own clients so we can send them surveys. The firm decides who is surveyed and why. The firm is responsible for having a lawful relationship with its clients and for telling them how their information is used. We handle that information on the firm's behalf, only to provide the service to that firm. We act only on the firm's instructions, and only to provide the service to that firm.

If you received a survey from a firm and have a question about your details, please contact that firm first. You can also contact us and we will help the firm respond. Every survey email has an unsubscribe link that works straight away.

What we collect about firms and their users

• Your email address, which is your login, and your password. We store the password only as a one-way hash, never as readable text.
• Your firm's details: the name your clients know you by, the country, the legal name, the postal address, a logo, a brand colour and a reply-to email address. The legal name and postal address appear in every survey email, because anti-spam law requires it.
• Who has access to the account and their role.
• The surveys and campaigns you create.
• A record of each time you confirm that the people you uploaded are your current clients: who confirmed, when, the exact wording and how many contacts were added.
• Cookies that keep you signed in, protect forms from forgery and show one-off messages on screen. We use no advertising or analytics cookies. Survey emails contain no tracking images.

What we collect about a firm's clients

We get these details from the firm, not from its clients, apart from what a client gives us by answering a survey or unsubscribing.

• Their email address. This is the only required field.
• Only if the firm includes them: first name, last name, client company, the email address of the staff member who looks after them, and any other columns the firm chooses to keep as labels.
• Whether they are marked "do not survey", and when they were last surveyed.
• For each survey email: when it was queued, sent and delivered, and whether it bounced or was reported as spam.
• Their answer: the score, any comment they write, and when they answered.
• Each time an answer link in a survey email is opened (and a hidden link that only automated programs follow): the time, the IP address and the browser identification (user agent). Email security scanners open links automatically before people do. We use these records only to tell a real answer from a scanner, and mark answers that look automated. Every survey email links to this policy.
• If they unsubscribe, or their address bounces permanently or they report the email as spam: a one-way scrambled code (a hash) made from their email address, with the reason. The code is kept with that firm's account so we never survey them again through that account, even if the firm deletes them or uploads them again. We cannot read the address from the code. We can only check whether an address matches it.

How we use it

• To run the service: send survey emails on the firm's behalf, record answers, show results, and honour unsubscribes.
• To tell the firm about a low score. We email the staff member recorded against that client or, if none is recorded, the firm's account administrators. That email includes the client's name, email address, company, score and comment.
• To protect our email sending: we check uploaded lists, cap how many emails an account can send, review larger campaigns by hand before they go, and pause an account whose emails bounce or are reported as spam too often. Our staff can see account information when they need to for this, or to support you and fix problems.
• To send account emails: confirming your email address, password resets and checking your reply-to address.
• To fix faults. When something breaks, our staff get an automatic technical alert. These alerts are built to leave out email addresses, form contents and links that identify a person.

We do not sell personal information. We do not use a firm's client details for our own marketing, and we never email a firm's clients except to send that firm's surveys. Replies to a survey email go straight to the firm's own reply-to address, not to us.

Where it is stored and who helps us

Our account and client data is stored in Australia. Some of our providers are US companies, and their staff may access systems from outside Australia for support or security. We use these service providers:

• DigitalOcean, Sydney: the server that runs howdwedo and its database.
• DigitalOcean Spaces, Sydney: nightly database backups. Backups are encrypted before they leave our server and are kept for 30 days.
• Amazon Web Services (Amazon SES and SNS), Sydney region: sending survey and account emails, and telling us about bounces and spam reports.
• Cloudflare: our domain name records (DNS), and forwarding email sent to hello@howdwedo.app on to our mailbox.
• Google Workspace: our staff mailbox. It receives email sent to hello@howdwedo.app and our own error and approval alerts. These alerts never contain client email addresses. An approval alert may list up to ten email domains (the part after the @) from a campaign.
• GitHub: our source code. No customer data.
• UptimeRobot: checks that the site is up by loading a status page. No customer data.

Countries where overseas recipients of personal information are located: the United States. Email sent to hello@howdwedo.app is processed by Cloudflare, a US company, on its way to our mailbox. Survey emails are delivered to your clients' own email providers, which may be anywhere in the world.

Our servers also keep technical logs of web requests (the page address and browser identification) and of errors. They are overwritten automatically as they fill up. To slow down password guessing, we count recent sign-in attempts against the IP address used, in temporary records that expire within minutes.

How long we keep it

We keep account and client information while the firm's account is open. Apart from link-click records, which are deleted after 90 days, we do not yet delete anything automatically. In particular:

• A firm can delete a contact at any time. If that contact has already been sent a survey, we keep their record, including name, company and answer, marked "do not survey", so the unsubscribe link in the email they received and their answer keep working.
• If a client asks the firm or us to remove their details, we erase their name, company, email address and comments, delete their link-click records, and keep only the scrambled code so they are never surveyed again. Their score stays in the firm's results without anything that identifies them.
• Link-click records (the IP address and browser identification described above) are deleted after 90 days. Contacts, answers and comments are kept for as long as the firm's account exists.
• The scrambled unsubscribe, bounce and spam report codes are kept for good, so the person is never surveyed again through that firm's account.
• Backups are kept for 30 days, so anything deleted is gone from backups 30 days later.

There is no button to close an account yet. To close your account and have its data deleted, email hello@howdwedo.app. We do this by hand for now. We plan to add automatic deletion of old contacts and a way to delete everything in an account, and will update this page when they are ready.

Getting your data

A firm can download its contacts and its survey responses as CSV files at any time, from inside the account.

If we ever close the service, every firm will get at least 90 days' notice and the chance to export its data.

Security

The site uses HTTPS. Passwords are stored as one-way hashes. Backups are encrypted. Access to our servers and to customer data is limited to the people who run the service. If we suspect a data breach, we will assess it promptly and within 30 days at the latest. If it is notifiable under the Privacy Act, we will tell the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner and the affected firms, and the affected people where the law requires, as soon as practicable.

Firms outside Australia

For now, howdwedo is not available to firms in the European Union, the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom. We will open it to them once we can offer a data processing agreement with standard contractual clauses. Firms in other countries can use howdwedo, and their data is stored in Australia. You are responsible for having a lawful basis to survey your clients under your local law and for telling them that a service provider in Australia handles their details.

Access, correction and complaints

Firms can see their information inside the account and change their firm details there. To ask for a copy of what we hold about you, to correct it, or to make a privacy complaint, email hello@howdwedo.app. We will reply within 30 days. If you are a firm's client, we may pass your request to the firm, because the firm is responsible for your details.

If you are not happy with our answer, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner at oaic.gov.au.

Changes to this policy

We will post any change on this page and update the date at the top. If a change is significant, we will also email account holders before it takes effect.