Privacy Policy

Surname Switch ("we", "us", "our") is an Australian online service that helps people update their name across the organisations that hold it: a marketing website at surnameswitch.com and an interactive tool at surnameswitch.com/app that builds a personal name-change plan, drafts notification messages and prefills official forms. You can contact us about privacy at contact@surnameswitch.com.

This policy covers the website, the tool, payments, our referral programs for celebrants and creators, and the business outreach we run to introduce those programs. It applies whether or not we are required to comply with the Privacy Act in respect of a particular activity: we treat the Australian Privacy Principles ("APPs") as our standard across everything we do.

Most services collect your information into a central database and then promise to protect it. Surname Switch is built the other way around. The details you enter into the tool are saved in your own browser's local storage on your own device, not in an account on our servers. We do not require an account or password, we do not maintain a customer database of plans, and the signature you draw for form prefilling is stamped onto the form on your device in the moment and is never transmitted to us or retained. Where a specific feature needs a detail to leave your device (for example, AI drafting of one message, or payment), only the details that feature needs are sent, they are sent encrypted, and they are used for that purpose alone. The practical effect is that for most users we hold no personal information at all once their kit is finished.

What is collected depends on which parts of the service you use.

3.1 Information you enter into the tool (held on your device)

• Your current name, the new surname you are moving to, and your first name.
• Your state or territory, whether you were born in Australia, and the reason for your change (for example marriage, divorce, or a new name) so the tool can tell you whether a formal registration applies.
• The organisations you choose to notify, and reference numbers for them that you choose to enter (for example an energy account number, super fund member number, or council assessment number).
• Contact details you enter so your messages and forms can carry them: email address, phone number, and residential address.
• Answers to form-specific questions where an official form requires them, which can include date of birth, gender, citizenship or residency status, whether you identify as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander (where a government form asks this), and document numbers such as a driver licence, Medicare or passport number.
• A signature you draw, used to stamp the signature lines of a form you generate.

All of the above is held in your browser's local storage under your control. It is not transmitted to our servers by the act of typing it in. Specific actions transmit specific subsets, described in sections 4 to 7. Some of it (for example gender, or Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander origin) can be sensitive information; it is collected only because an official form you asked us to fill requires it, is used only to fill that form on your device, and does not leave your device as part of form prefilling.

3.2 Information collected when you pay

• The email address you enter at checkout, the plan you bought, the amount, and any referral code you used. Payment is processed by Stripe; your card number goes directly to Stripe and we never see or store it.

3.3 Information collected if you apply to a referral program

• Name, business name, email address, phone number, state, celebrant registration number (celebrants), audience details (creators), and anything you write in the application message.

3.4 Business contact information for our outreach

• For marriage celebrants and similar wedding businesses we may hold publicly available business contact details (name, business name, business email address, suburb, state, phone number) collected from public sources such as the public celebrant register and business websites, together with our correspondence history: which of our emails were sent to you, whether an email was opened or a link clicked, whether you replied, and whether you asked us not to contact you.

3.5 Information collected automatically

• Standard web server and security logs kept by our hosting provider (Cloudflare), which include IP address, browser type and pages requested.
• Usage analytics via Google Analytics (section 9): pages viewed, events such as completing a step or a purchase, approximate location derived from IP, and device information. Analytics never receives your name-change details, your messages, or your form data.
• If you arrive through a referral link, the referral code, stored in your browser so the discount applies at checkout.

3.6 Correspondence

• If you email us, we hold that correspondence in our mailbox.

What we deliberately do not collect

• We do not ask you to upload identity documents. You attach your marriage certificate or other proof yourself, directly to each organisation.
• We do not require an account or password to build a plan, and we do not operate a database of customer plans.
• We do not collect government identifiers for our own use, and we never use a government identifier (such as a Medicare or licence number) to identify you in our systems.
• We do not ask for more than a given task needs.

We collect information directly from you: what you type into the tool, the checkout, an application form, or an email to us. The exceptions are the automatically collected data in section 3.5 and the publicly sourced business contact details in section 3.4. You can browse the whole website, and build a complete plan in the tool, without identifying yourself to us at all; anonymity is the default until you use a feature that needs a detail (APP 2).

We collect, hold, use and disclose personal information only for the following purposes:

• To provide the service: work out whether a formal change of name applies to you, build your ordered plan, draft notification messages, prefill official forms you choose to generate, and let you resume your plan.
• To process payment and deliver what you bought, including applying referral discounts.
• To run the referral programs: validate codes, credit referrers, and pay them quarterly.
• To introduce our referral program to wedding businesses (section 8).
• To respond when you contact us.
• To understand aggregate usage of the site so we can improve it.
• To meet legal obligations, and to establish or defend legal claims.

We do not sell, rent or trade personal information. We do not use your information for marketing unrelated to the service, and we do not send marketing to users of the tool.

When you press the button asking for an AI-drafted message, the details relevant to that one message (such as your name, new name, the organisation, and the reference number for it) are sent securely to our AI provider, Anthropic, to generate the draft. This happens only when you ask, never automatically. Under our commercial terms with Anthropic, the content is not used to train their models. The generated draft is returned to your browser and cached on your device. A message drafted for a context such as a divorce or a gender-affirming change necessarily reflects that context; if you prefer that this context not be sent to the AI provider, use the built-in non-AI message text instead, which is produced entirely on your device and is always available.

Payments are processed by Stripe Payments Australia and its related entities. We receive confirmation of payment, the checkout email address, the plan bought and any referral code; Stripe holds the payment record, including card details, under its own privacy policy. If you use the option to email yourself a resume link, we send that one email through our email provider (Resend) to the address you give; the link encodes your plan so it can reopen on another device, and we do not add your address to any list.

7.1 Marketing emails: plan tips, only if you ask

If you type your email into the optional box under your result in the tool, you are asking us to email you. We then keep exactly two details, your first name and your email address, on our email provider's (Resend's) list, and send you three short emails over about a week: a link back to the tool, the places people forget to update, and what our Powered plan does. Then we stop. If you buy Powered before the third email, we cancel it. Every email has a one-click unsubscribe; using it cancels anything still scheduled and marks you unsubscribed. Leave the box blank and none of this happens: we hold nothing about you at all. We never use this list for anything else, and never share or sell it.

8.1 If you buy using a referrer's code

If you buy using a code given to you by a referrer (for example your celebrant), we share the purchase date, the plan you bought and the email address you used at checkout with that referrer, so they can verify the referral that we pay them for. Referrers agree to keep this confidential and must not use it for marketing. If you do not want this shared, simply do not use a referral code (you will not receive its discount).

8.2 If you are a referrer

We hold your application details, your code, and a tally of purchases made with your code, and we use your email address to send you your quarterly referral statement and program correspondence.

8.3 If you are a celebrant or wedding business we contact

We send a small volume of introduction emails to wedding businesses using publicly available business contact details, in reliance on the consent inferred from conspicuous publication of those details in a business context, as recognised by the Spam Act 2003 (Cth). Every such email identifies us and contains a working unsubscribe. If you reply, ask us to stop, or use your mail client's unsubscribe function, we record that instruction and never email you again; we keep the minimal record (your address and the opt-out flag) precisely so the instruction sticks. Opens and clicks of these emails are measured with a tracking pixel and tracked links served from our own domain. You can ask us at any time to delete your row entirely.

The tool uses your browser's local storage to save your plan on your device (this is the feature, not tracking). The site and the tool use Google Analytics 4, which sets cookies and collects device and usage information under Google's privacy policy; we use it to see what is used and what is abandoned so we can improve the product. It never receives the contents of your plan, your messages or your forms. You can block analytics with any standard cookie or tracker blocker and every feature of the site and tool works exactly the same. We also keep our own anonymous count of how far each visit to the tool gets: the furthest step reached, whether the price was seen or checkout started, and a channel label such as "google" or "direct". It uses a random number that lasts only as long as the browser tab, holds no name, address, plan details or cookies, and is deleted after 120 days. The address field in the tool uses Google Maps address autocomplete: as you type an address, the text you type is sent to Google to return suggestions, under Google's privacy policy.

We use a small number of service providers, each receiving only what its function needs:

• Stripe (payments): checkout and payment details.
• Anthropic (AI drafting): the details of a message you ask it to draft, on request only.
• Resend (transactional email): the recipient address and content of a resume email, application confirmation, or program email.
• Cloudflare (hosting and security): standard request logs for every visitor.
• Google (analytics and address autocomplete): usage events and typed address queries as described in section 9.
• Referrers: the purchase verification details in section 8.1.

We may also disclose personal information where required or authorised by law, including to law enforcement or a regulator with lawful authority. We do not otherwise disclose personal information to anyone.

Some of the providers above store or process data outside Australia, principally in the United States (Stripe, Anthropic, Resend, Google, and Cloudflare's global network, which may also route traffic through other countries in which Cloudflare operates data centres). Where this happens it is limited to the specific details described above, under contracts with providers that maintain recognised security and privacy programs. The contents of your plan and your prefilled forms are not sent overseas because they do not leave your device, apart from the specific AI drafting and resume email flows you choose to trigger.

We protect personal information by holding as little of it as possible, encrypting all traffic in transit (TLS), keeping secrets such as API keys out of our published code, restricting access to our mailbox and provider dashboards, and applying expiry to operational data (section 13). The most privacy-sensitive material in the product, your plan and your forms, is protected by the strongest measure available: it never reaches us. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security, but we make every reasonable effort. If a data breach involving personal information we hold is likely to result in serious harm, we will notify affected people and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner in accordance with the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme.

• Your plan: stays in your browser until you clear it (the tool has a start-over control, and clearing your browser data removes it). We cannot delete it for you because we do not have it.
• AI drafts: cached on your device with your plan.
• Payment records: retained by Stripe, and referenced by us, for as long as tax and accounting law requires.
• Referral tallies: purchase-verification records used for referrer payments expire automatically after 2 years.
• Outreach measurement: open and click tracking records expire automatically after 180 days. Opt-out records are kept indefinitely, because deleting them would break the promise they exist to keep.
• Plan tips email list (only if you asked): your first name and email stay on the list until you unsubscribe, and are then kept only as an unsubscribed record so we never email you again. Ask us and we delete them entirely.
• Correspondence and applications: kept in our mailbox while relevant, then deleted in periodic clean-ups.
• Analytics and logs: retained under Google's and Cloudflare's standard rolling retention periods.
• Anonymous visit counts: deleted automatically after 120 days.

When personal information we hold is no longer needed for any purpose in section 5 and no law requires us to keep it, we take reasonable steps to delete it.

You can ask us what personal information we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it, by emailing contact@surnameswitch.com. We will respond within 30 days. There is no charge for making a request. Because most user data lives only on your own device, the honest answer to an access request will often be that we hold nothing beyond a payment record or an email you sent us (or, if you asked for our plan tips emails, your first name and email address); where we do hold something, we will give you access unless a legal exception applies, and if we refuse we will tell you why in writing and how to complain. If you ask us to correct information and we disagree, you can require us to attach a statement of your view to it.

If you believe we have mishandled your personal information, email contact@surnameswitch.com with "Privacy complaint" in the subject. We will acknowledge your complaint promptly, investigate, and give you a written response within 30 days. If you are not satisfied with our response, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner: online at oaic.gov.au, by phone on 1300 363 992, or by mail to GPO Box 5288, Sydney NSW 2001.

The service is intended for adults managing their own name change and is not directed at children under 18. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children.

We may update this policy from time to time, for example when we add a feature that changes what is collected. The current version is always the one published at surnameswitch.com/privacy, with its date shown at the top. Material changes will be flagged on this page.