Privacy policy

Version 13 September 2026 · Mowie Pty Ltd

Mowie is an online marketplace, operated by Mowie Pty Ltd, that connects people who want their lawn mowed ("customers") with independent lawn mowing businesses ("mowers"). This policy explains what personal information we collect, why, who sees it, who we share it with, which decisions are automated, and how you can access or correct it. We handle personal information in line with the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs), whether or not we're currently required to.

1. What we collect

Everyone

• Contact and account details - name, email address, a password (stored only as a salted hash - we can't read it), and a mobile number (required for mowers, and for customers before a listing is published - we confirm it with a code we text you). The links we email you to confirm your address or reset a password expire and are single-use.
• Device and usage data - IP address, browser and device type, pages visited and the site you came from, and the actions you take in the app (listings, bids, jobs, messages, which listings a mower opens). We log these to run the service, keep it secure, investigate problems and understand what's working.
• Messages you send through the in-app chat between a customer and the mower they've hired, and anything you send us through the contact form or by email.
• Terms acceptance - when you ticked the box accepting our terms, which version you accepted, and the IP address it came from, so we can show what you agreed to and when.
• Marketing preference - whether you've ticked the box to receive occasional Mowie news. It's off unless you turn it on.
• Notification subscriptions - if you turn on notifications on a phone or computer, the push address your browser gives us for that device and the keys that go with it. It can only be used to send that device the same messages that appear in your Mowie inbox. Turn it off on your account page, or in your browser.

Customers

• Property details - the address, its map location, the block outline and house footprint we look up from public land-registry and mapping data, any lawn outline you trace, and the size we calculate from it.
• Access details - gate type, whether it's locked, a gate code if you give one, whether there's a dog, obstacles, whether someone will be home, and any notes. A gate code and whether anyone's home are stored so the mower you hire can plan; they're never shown to mowers who are only bidding.
• Photos of your lawn, and the "after" photos the mower sends when the job is done. Photos are resized on upload and all embedded metadata, including any location tag from your phone, is removed. Photos you attach to an issue are sent to the mower and to Mowie staff. Photos are served from unlisted links that anyone holding the link can open.
• Payment details - your card is entered directly with Stripe, our payment provider. We store only the card brand, last four digits, expiry and a Stripe reference. We never see or store your full card number.
• Reviews you leave about a mower, and issues you raise about a job.
• NDIS funding - if you tell us, or a mower, that a mow is paid for with NDIS funding, that says something about a person's disability, which the Privacy Act treats as sensitive information. We collect it only when you choose to give it, and we use it only to arrange that mow, issue its paperwork and keep the record. It is never used for marketing or advertising. On a listing we record that an NDIS plan is paying and whether it is self-managed or plan-managed. If you want them on your paperwork you can save the participant's name, and their NDIS number, on your account; they stay there until you remove them, which you can do at any time from your account page. A plan-managed job also needs your plan manager's name and invoice email, saved in the same place, because the invoice can't be paid without them. We ask for these when you hire a mower for an NDIS-funded mow and on your account page, and nowhere else. Please keep NDIS numbers and plan details out of listing notes and chat.

Mowers

• Business details - business name, ABN and, where we look it up, the entity name and GST status held by the Australian Business Register, years of experience, equipment, suburbs you cover, working days and hours, website and social links.
• Date of birth - to confirm you're 18 or over and because the ATO requires it in our reporting. It's never shown to anyone.
• Profile content - your photo, tagline, bio and the work photos you upload. These are public.
• Insurance documents if you upload a certificate of currency for the Insured badge, and its expiry date.
• Identity and bank details are collected and held by Stripe when you set up payouts, under Stripe's own privacy policy. We hold only your Stripe account ID and payout status, and we can retrieve the account you're paid into for ATO reporting.
• Performance data - jobs done, on-time rate, ratings and reviews, disputes, warnings.
• NDIS details - whether you take NDIS-funded jobs and, if you give them to us, your NDIS provider registration number and your NDIS Worker Screening Check number and expiry. Once checked they show as badges on your profile and bids; the numbers themselves aren't shown.

Kids' first job page

The interest form on that page asks a parent or guardian for their own name and contact details and a teenager's age bracket - nothing that identifies the young person. We use it only to contact the parent when family crews open.

2. Why we collect it

• To run the marketplace: match your listing with mowers nearby, show bids, book jobs, and let the customer and hired mower coordinate.
• To send you the notifications the service depends on - confirmation and password links, new bids, "on my way", job-done photos, the reminder before a job approves itself, receipts and payout notices - by email, in-app inbox and, for a few time-critical moments only, SMS: the code that confirms your mobile number, "you're hired" to a mower, and a cancellation at short notice. You can turn off job emails and texts in your account; confirmation, password, receipt and safety messages always come.
• To take and pay out payments, and to keep records of transactions.
• To resolve issues and disputes, handle damage reports, prevent fraud and misuse, and enforce our terms fairly.
• To improve the service, including anonymised, aggregated statistics such as the average bid for a lawn of a given size in a suburb.
• To meet legal obligations, including tax reporting (section 5).
• Only if you've opted in, to send you occasional Mowie news and offers. Every marketing message has an unsubscribe link, and we never mix promotions into job messages.

3. Who sees what

• Mowers we haven't approved yet see only the suburb, the lawn size and what's asked - no map, photos or access details.
• Approved mowers who are bidding see your suburb, the lawn outline and size, your photos, the condition and access details you gave (except a gate code and whether anyone will be home), your first name and your notes. They don't see your street address, a street-level photo of your house, or your phone number. We record which mowers open your listing.
• The mower you hire sees your full address, name, mobile number, gate code, access notes, whether anyone will be home and a street-level view of the front, and can message you in the app. Mowers agree to use this only for the job.
• Customers see a mower's business name, photo, tagline, bio, work photos, suburbs, services, rating and reviews, Insured and Founding badges, and, if the mower turns it on, the registered entity name behind their ABN. A customer who hires a mower also sees their mobile number.
• Public suburb pages and mower profiles show the mower's finished-lawn photo, the price and reviews, without customers' names, addresses or locations. You can turn that off. There's a tick box when you list, a switch in your account, and a button on every job - before or after you pay. With it off, those pages show a placeholder card in place of your photo; the job itself still counts towards the mower's record. Your own "before" photos are never published.
• NDIS-funded listings - mowers who can bid see that a listing is NDIS-funded and whether a plan manager is paying, because it changes how the job is priced and paid. The participant's details you saved go on that job's receipt or invoice, which the mower you hired also receives. No other mower sees them.
• Mowie staff can see the above, and read messages, to support you and resolve disputes and safety concerns.

4. Who we share it with

We share personal information only with the service providers we need to run Mowie, and only what each one needs:

• Stripe (payments, mower identity verification, payouts and refunds).
• Our email and SMS delivery providers, which receive your email address or mobile number and the message.
• Google (address lookup, mapping and street imagery) and the Victorian land registry's public mapping service. Your address is sent to the mapping provider to find its location; imagery is publicly available satellite, aerial and street-level imagery. Google's handling of what it receives is governed by the Google Privacy Policy, and your use of the map features by the Google Maps/Google Earth Additional Terms of Service.
• An AI language-model provider. Text you write in listing notes and dispute descriptions may be processed to pull out access details, draft a bid message for a mower, or suggest how to resolve an issue. No card or bank details are sent, and the output is a suggestion that a person reviews before anything final happens.
• Hosting and infrastructure: Fly.io (application and database, Sydney) and Cloudflare (security, content delivery, and encrypted backup copies stored in its Oceania region).
• The Australian Taxation Office, under the Sharing Economy Reporting Regime: for each mower, twice a year, name, date of birth, address, contact details, ABN, payout bank account and the gross amounts and number of jobs paid through Mowie.
• A customer who reports property damage from a mower's visit: we tell the mower first and give the two of them 2 business days to sort it directly; after that the customer receives the mower's business name, ABN, business email, contact mobile and insurance details (insurer and expiry, not the certificate file, which is available on request) so they can make a claim. Mowers agree to this in the vendor terms.
• Your plan manager, for an NDIS plan-managed job: the mower's invoice, which carries the participant's name and NDIS number, the address, the date and the hours worked. We send it at your request, to the address you gave us.
• Anyone else only if you ask us to, if the law requires it, or if it's needed to protect someone's safety or our legal rights.

We don't sell personal information, and we don't share it with advertisers.

5. Overseas disclosure

Our application and database are hosted in Sydney, Australia. Some of the providers above are based in or process data outside Australia: Stripe, Google, and our email, SMS and AI providers in the United States, and Cloudflare, which routes traffic through its global network and stores our encrypted backup copies in its Oceania region. Where we send information overseas we use providers that meet recognised security standards and are bound by contract to protect it. We tell you this so you can decide: if you use Mowie, we treat your acceptance of the terms as consent to those overseas disclosures, and Australian Privacy Principle 8.1 will not apply to them.

6. Automated decisions

Some things in Mowie happen automatically, using your information. Knowing which ones matters, so here they are:

• Which mowers hear about a listing - those covering the suburb, by distance, widening if no bid arrives; a listing closes after 72 hours without a hire.
• The order bids are shown in under "recommended" - rating, reliability, whether the mower is insured, price and distance. You can sort by price or choose any bid; the order never hides a bid.
• Automatic approval and payment 48 hours after a completion photo if the customer takes no action, with an email reminder 24 hours before, and an issue window for 7 days after.
• Badges and gates - the Insured badge drops when a certificate's expiry date passes; once the insurance rule applies, mowers without a current certificate can't bid.
• Suggestions - price guides, suggested bids, drafted bid messages and dispute triage notes, generated with rules and AI. They're suggestions; a person decides.

Decisions that significantly affect a person - approving, warning, suspending or removing a mower, resolving an issue, refunds - are made by a person. You can ask us to review any automated outcome using the contact details below.

7. How long we keep it

• Transaction records (jobs, payments, receipts, ATO reports) for at least 5 years, as tax law requires.
• Your account and property details while your account is active. If you delete your account, we anonymise your name, contact details and addresses; job and payment records are kept in de-identified form for the period above.
• Photos are kept while the related lawn, job or profile exists, then removed on request or when the account is deleted; copies may remain in our content-delivery cache for up to a year after deletion.
• NDIS details you save on your account are kept until you remove them or delete your account. The copy on a receipt or invoice we have issued is a transaction record and is kept for the period above. Once a plan-managed job's invoice is paid, the job itself keeps only the participant's name.
• Terms-acceptance records for the life of the account plus 7 years.
• Confirmation and reset links expire within days and are single-use; messages, issues and dispute records are kept with the job they belong to; usage logs for 12 months.

8. Security and data breaches

Data is encrypted in transit (HTTPS) and accessible only to the people who need it; passwords are stored as salted hashes and never sent to us in the clear; card and bank details are handled only by Stripe; gate codes and "who's home" are shown only to the hired mower. We keep backups and access logs. If a data breach is likely to cause serious harm we'll assess it within 30 days, notify you and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner as the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme requires, and tell you what to do. Mowers must tell us within 24 hours if a device holding customer details is lost.

9. Cookies

We set four cookies of our own: a session cookie that keeps you logged in, a short-lived cookie that carries status messages between pages, a cookie noting that your browser already holds our stylesheet so later pages load smaller, and, if you arrive with a founding-partner code, a cookie remembering it for 30 days. The homepage also uses browser storage to remember you closed a banner for 7 days. Cloudflare protects the site and runs a bot check on forms you can send without an account; it may set a security cookie to tell people from bots, under the Cloudflare Privacy Policy. Pages with a map load Google Maps, which may set Google's own cookies under the Google Privacy Policy. We use Google Analytics to measure how many people visit the site and which pages they read; it sets Google's cookies and sends that usage data to Google under the Google Privacy Policy, and you can opt out with Google's browser add-on. We don't use advertising cookies. When you list a lawn, a Google Ads conversion tag tells Google that an ad click led to a listing, so we know which ads work; it uses Google's own cookies and carries nothing about you or your lawn.

10. Children

You must be 18 or older to hold a Mowie account, and we don't knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. Teenagers who want to mow do so through a parent's account when family crews open; see section 1 for what the interest form collects.

11. Your rights

• Access and correction - most details can be updated in your account. For anything else, email us and we'll respond within 30 days.
• Deletion - you can delete your account yourself from the account page (once no job is in progress), or ask us to.
• Marketing - unsubscribe from any marketing email, or turn "Mowie news" off in your account.
• Automated decisions - ask us to review any automated outcome (section 6).
• Complaints - contact our Privacy Officer first; we acknowledge within 2 business days, investigate and reply within 30 days. If you're not satisfied you can complain to the OAIC at oaic.gov.au.

12. Changes

We'll update this policy as the service changes and note the version at the top. Material changes are announced in the app or by email before they apply.

13. Contact

Privacy Officer, Mowie Pty Ltd · info@mowie.com.au · contact page