Plumbline Report

Privacy

What we hold, why we hold it, and what we will not claim.

This policy covers Plumbline Report. It is written to be read, not to be survived.

Last updated 6 October 2026.

The short version

We ask you one question a day about how you would vote. That answer is sensitive information under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth), because political opinion is treated as sensitive in a way that most personal information is not. We treat it accordingly.

We link your daily answers to your account. We have to: the entire method depends on following the same people over time, and an anonymous daily poll would tell you nothing you could not get from a nightly phone survey.

So the honest promise is this: no one can see how you individually voted in anything we publish. It is not that we do not know. We do know, and we must, or none of the analysis on this site would be possible. Any organisation running a daily panel that tells you otherwise is describing something they have not built.

Who we are

Plumbline Report is published by Synap AI Pty Ltd (ABN 86 695 003 653). Synap AI Pty Ltd is the entity responsible for the personal information described here, and "we" on this page means it. Contact details are at the end of this page.

What we collect

When you join

Each day you vote

What we do not ask

We do not currently ask for your age, education, or how you voted at the last election. If we add questions like these, they will be optional, never required to vote, and this page will say so before they start.

Location, specifically

We do not store your coordinates. When you record a vote, your browser may ask to share your location. If you allow it, we work out in memory whether the reading falls in Australia, keep only that, and discard the coordinates in the same operation. There is no column in our database for latitude or longitude, by design. We do not currently keep your state or region.

Location never stops you voting. If you decline the prompt, nothing happens to your vote. We do not yet use location to filter or report results; if we start, the rules will be published on the method page first.

We are also candid that location data is weak evidence. It is straightforward to falsify. We use it as a disclosure statistic and as one signal among several, not as proof of anything about you.

Your consent

Because your voting intention is sensitive information, we collect it only with your consent. Joining the panel and recording a vote is that consent. You can withdraw it at any time by deleting your account. That withdraws today's answer, and separates your past answers from your email and mobile, as described under Retention.

What we publish

Only aggregates. Every published figure is a count across a group, never a row about a person.

We apply a minimum cell size before publishing any breakdown. A party with too few responses is not named: it is combined with others into "All others", and if that combined group is still too small, more parties join it until nothing small can be worked out by subtraction. When a day is too small for any of that, the whole breakdown is withheld, party names included. This is not a courtesy — a sufficiently narrow crosstab ("male, 35–44, regional Victoria, teacher") describes one identifiable person, and publishing it would be a disclosure regardless of the fact that no name appears.

Who else sees your information

We use a small number of service providers, and only for what they are named for:

Google Analytics is not connected to your account or your answers. It measures pages, not people: we use it to know whether the method page is being read, not to look up what any individual did. It runs only on the public pages — the front page, results, method, privacy, terms, contact and join pages — and only for visitors who are not signed in. It never runs while you are signed in, on the pages behind the private links in our emails (confirmation, password reset, email settings and the daily voting link), or on the admin pages.

Mailgun, Twilio and Google Analytics are United States companies, and the data named above is handled by them outside Australia. That is an overseas disclosure and we state it plainly rather than burying it. Your voting answers are not sent to either of them.

We do not sell your personal information. We do not share it with political parties, campaigns, or candidates, and we will not, in any form that could identify you.

Artificial intelligence

We use Synap's own AI service in our administration tools, to help staff draft the configuration for a new election — its name, date, timezone and the parties on its ballot.

No panellist information is sent to it. Not your answers, not your email, not your number. It is given a description of a public election and nothing else, and a person reviews everything it proposes before it is saved.

Retention and deletion

You can delete your account at any time from your account page, or ask us to. When you do, we delete your email address, your mobile number, your password, and the network details stored with each of your answers (the IP address and a scrambled identifier for your browser). If you have answered today, that answer is withdrawn as well, because today's figures have not been published yet.

Answers from days that have already been published stay in the record. Removing individual rows from behind a published figure would falsify it, and we are not willing to do that. Those answers stay attached to an anonymous account number, so that published matched-panel figures can still be reproduced, but that number is no longer connected to your email address or mobile number anywhere in our database.

Accounts that are inactive for an extended period are closed and their identifying information deleted on the same basis.

Seeing and correcting what we hold

You can ask us for a copy of the personal information we hold about you, and ask us to correct it if it is wrong. Write to the address below. We will need to be confident you are who you say you are before we send anything, for obvious reasons.

One thing we cannot correct is a past vote. Answers lock when you save them, and a record you can revise afterwards is not a record of what you thought that day.

Security

Traffic is encrypted in transit. Passwords are hashed with Argon2id. Verification tokens are stored only as hashes, so the values in our database cannot be used to confirm an address. Access to the underlying data is restricted to named administrator accounts, and administrative actions are written to an append-only audit log.

No system is beyond compromise, and we will not pretend otherwise. If a breach occurs that is likely to cause you serious harm, we will notify you and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, as the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme requires.

Email you receive from us

We send one prompt a day while an election you have joined is running, plus occasional messages about your account. Every one carries a working unsubscribe link.

We would rather you paused than left. An unsubscribe is permanent and costs us a panellist; a pause is not. Both options appear in every email.

Complaints

If you think we have mishandled your personal information, tell us first and we will investigate. If our response does not satisfy you, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner at oaic.gov.au.

Changes

If we change this policy in a way that materially affects you, we will tell you by email rather than quietly updating the date at the top.

Contact

hamish@synap.au