Privacy
Close Enough lets you look up Melbourne addresses without an account. If you sign in, we save your addresses, search history, deep reports, and credit balance. Sales-agent and admin features track referrals and commissions. You can export and delete your account from Settings — both are immediate.
Close Enough is a Melbourne address-liveability dashboard. Free lookups work without an account. Optional accounts unlock saved addresses, search history, deep reports, and the Pro subscription. The mobile app can use your device GPS when you ask it to, but never stores your location. Sales agents have an extra layer that tracks referrals and commission attribution.
What we collect
We collect and store the following kinds of data, each with its own retention and legal basis:
- Account — Your sign-in identity is managed by Lotl Auth, our authentication service (auth.lotlsoft.com). Lotl Auth stores your email, your name if you provided one, and a hash of your password (argon2id). Sign-in issues a short-lived JWT access token (15 minutes) and a refresh token (30 days). Email verification and password resets go through transactional email (Resend).
- Saved addresses — Addresses you save to your account, with whatever label and notes you attach. They appear in your dashboard so you can re-open them later.
- Deep reports — Each deep report you generate is stored against your account so you can re-open it without paying again. You can delete a report at any time; deletion is immediate.
- Search history — Your recent free and deep lookups so the app can show 'recents' and rerun a search. We also cache geocoded coordinates briefly so repeated lookups don't re-charge the geocoder.
- Device location — Only used when you tap 'Use my location' in the mobile app. The coordinate is sent to the geocoder, converted to an address, and discarded. Nothing about your location is stored.
- Credits and purchases — Your credit balance, every purchase, every spend, every starter grant, every referral redemption, and your Pro subscription state — visible to you in Settings as a transaction ledger. Purchase records are kept for tax and dispute resolution even if you delete your account.
- Usage telemetry — Anonymous usage events, performance gauges, and error reports are sent to Lotl Observe, our observability service (observe.lotlsoft.com). Lotl Observe stores error messages, stack traces, request URLs, user-agent strings, telemetry events, and per-event metadata. It does not store the contents of your application data. We process this under legitimate interests: Lotl Observe is in-house, no third-party analytics or session replay is involved, and identifiers are pseudonymous. Account deletion removes your associated telemetry. Project-specific: telemetry doesn't include your saved-address contents or deep-report results.
- Sales attribution and commissions — If you signed up via a sales-agent referral, we track the attribution so the agent can be paid commission. Sales agents see their own commissions and referred customers in their dashboard; admins see the full ledger.
- Feedback messages — Feedback you send via the in-app form is stored unredacted so we can read it. Don't paste passwords, account numbers, or anything sensitive — we'll see it.
What we don't collect
We deliberately don't collect or store any of these:
- Continuous location data — the mobile 'Use my location' button geocodes a single coordinate and discards it
- Behavioural fingerprinting, session replay, or third-party tracking pixels
- Information from people who haven't created an account (anonymous lookups stay anonymous)
Cookies
We don't use cookies for tracking. We use localStorage to keep you signed in and remember UI preferences.
Third parties
These external services receive some of your data:
- Atlas of Living Australia — biodiversity occurrence data for the address area (server sends a coordinate-bounded query)
- Australian government open-data services — LGA boundaries (ABS), planning overlays (VIC), public-toilet locations (NSW), and other gov.au datasets queried server-side by area
- CartoDB — browser-side basemap tiles for the map widgets (the tile URLs encode your map viewport)
- DigitalOcean — server hosting for the Close Enough service
- Google APIs — address geocoding, places, air quality, and Street View imagery
- Open-Elevation — free elevation lookup for the address coordinates
- OSRM routing service — walking, cycling, and driving route distance calculations (only when self-hosted OSRM isn't available; production typically routes via Google)
- Resend — transactional email delivery
- Stripe — payment processing for credits and Pro subscriptions
Where your data is stored
Close Enough runs on DigitalOcean's Sydney region; your data stays in Australia. Google APIs (geocoding, places, air-quality, Street View imagery) process address queries from their global infrastructure. Stripe processes payments in their region (typically the US for cards issued there); Resend delivers email through Amazon SES infrastructure. We don't transfer data internationally beyond those processor relationships.
Children's data
Close Enough is intended for adults researching liveability of Melbourne addresses. We don't knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 16. If we learn we've stored data from a child, we'll delete it.
If something goes wrong
If we ever discover a data breach affecting your account, we'll email you within 72 hours and tell you what was accessed and what we're doing about it.
Your rights
You can export everything we hold about you (Settings → Export) and delete your account at any time (Settings → Delete account). Deletion cascades through saved addresses, search history, deep reports, telemetry, and feedback. Purchase records are retained for tax and dispute reasons. We don't anonymise on delete; we remove.
Contact
Questions about privacy? Email privacy@lotlsoft.com.
Last updated: 2026-05-27 · Version 2026.05.10.