How AquaSentinel collects, stores, uses, and protects information about you, your home, and the people you nominate to help when a leak fires.
The short version. Your data lives in Sydney. We don't sell it. We share only what an insurer or plumber needs to respond to a leak. You can opt out of SMS by replying STOP, opt out of push in iOS settings, and request deletion of your account at any time. Full detail below.
"AquaSentinel" (we, us, our) is an Australian residential water-leak detection and plumber-dispatch service. We provide IoT sensors that detect leaks at your home and coordinate a response involving you, optionally a nominated neighbour or building manager, a verified local plumber, and — where you have an active home-insurance policy with a participating insurer — your insurer's claim-handling team.
We are based in Australia and operate exclusively from Australian Web Services (AWS) infrastructure in the Sydney Region (ap-southeast-2).
Contact for privacy matters: privacy@aquasentinel.pro · Postal: AquaSentinel, [registered AU address].
Every byte of personal data we hold about you, your home, and your nominated contacts is stored in AWS Sydney (ap-southeast-2):
We do not use AWS Regions outside Australia for primary storage. Backups remain within ap-southeast-2 unless we expand explicitly to other Australian regions and update this policy first. Cross-border transfer of personal information happens only in narrow, disclosed cases — see Section 07.
Why this matters for insurer partners. Australian general insurers (Suncorp, IAG, QBE and others) operate under Australian Privacy Principles (APPs) and increasingly require their data partners to hold customer data on Australian soil. AquaSentinel's architecture is Sydney-only by design — not by accident — so an insurer due-diligence team can verify residency in a single AWS console screenshot.
| Category | What's collected | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Account | Name, email, phone, password (hashed by Cognito), role (homeowner / plumber / building manager). | Sign you in; address you correctly in alerts. |
| Property | Address, geocoded coordinates, mains-tap location and photo (optional). | Route the right plumber; tell a neighbour where to find your mains shutoff. |
| Sensor data | Moisture readings, flow, pressure, battery, last-seen timestamps from the sensors you install. | Detect leaks; rank severity; raise alerts. |
| Contacts | Names, phone numbers, relationship type (neighbour / building manager / installer) for the people you nominate as emergency contacts. | So we can SMS them when a leak fires. We collect contacts only after you add them in the app — we do not read your phone's address book. |
| Location (Pro app only) | Plumber location (when actively on the network and tracking is enabled by the plumber). | Match the nearest plumber to a job. Plumbers can pause sharing at any time. |
| Photos | Mains-tap photo, leak evidence, post-repair photos uploaded inside the app. | Speed up the plumber's first visit; build the insurer claim pack. |
| Communications | Messages and structured Q&A answers exchanged inside a dispatch chat. | Coordinate the response; produce a tamper-evident archive when the dispatch closes. |
| Device tokens | Apple Push Notification (APNs) tokens, per app bundle (consumer / pro / owner). | Deliver push notifications. Tokens are opaque to us. |
| Diagnostics | App version, build number, device model, OS version, crash logs and rate-limited debug events. | Find and fix bugs. Used in aggregate; not linked to insurance claims. |
You opt in to AquaSentinel's services in three places, and each opt-in can be withdrawn:
Honest disclosure of current state. Some of the consent surfaces described above are being rolled out as part of our active development — see the Section 12 changelog for what's live today vs in the next release. We will not store personal data we have not informed you about; this policy is updated before any new data type is collected.
When a sensor detects a leak meeting our severity threshold, we run a coordinated response:
SMS opt-out: reply STOP to any AquaSentinel SMS at any time. We process the keyword automatically (also accepting UNSUBSCRIBE / CANCEL / END / QUIT) and stop sending you SMS within minutes. Reply HELP for our service description and the contact email above.
Push opt-out: turn off notifications for AquaSentinel in iOS Settings → Notifications → AquaSentinel.
Sender identity: SMS appear from "AQUASENT" (registered Sender ID — pending registration, see Section 12) for Australian recipients, and from a long code in regions where Sender IDs are not supported.
We do not send marketing or promotional SMS. All AquaSentinel SMS are transactional safety alerts or coordination messages tied to a specific event you or your property is part of.
We share information only with parties who are necessary to deliver the service you signed up for, and only the minimum required:
| Recipient | What they see | Why |
|---|---|---|
| The plumber assigned to your job | Property address, mains-tap location and photo (if you've shared one), the dispatch chat thread, sensor reading at time of alert. | So they can arrive prepared and stop the leak fast. |
| The neighbour / building manager you nominated | Property address, your first name, mains-tap location, the dispatch thread. | So they can walk over and shut off the water. |
| Your insurer (foundation-partner insurers only, when you have an active policy and the leak triggers a claim) | The dispatch audit pack: alert metadata, response timeline, photos, plumber's verified shutoff record. | Faster, evidence-based claim resolution. We never share your full chat history with marketing or general insurer staff — only the closed claim pack with their authorised claim assessor. |
| AWS (our infrastructure provider) | All operational data, encrypted, in AWS Sydney. | Compute, storage, dispatch. AWS is bound by their Customer Agreement and the Australian Privacy Principles. |
| Anthropic (Claude model API, via AWS Bedrock or HTTPS) | Severity-scoring snippets and dispatch summarisation prompts. No PII is sent — alerts are de-identified before scoring. | Severity assessment, narrative summarisation. Anthropic does not retain prompts past 30 days under our terms. |
| Apple (Push notification service) | Encrypted notification payload + your device token. | Deliver push to your device. |
| Tuya (sensor cloud, where used) | Raw sensor telemetry. Tuya holds device data in its regional cloud; we mirror it into AWS Sydney as soon as our bridge ingests it. | The IoT sensor manufacturer's stack feeds raw readings into ours. We are reviewing alternatives that keep telemetry in Sydney from the device upward. |
| Stripe (payments — plumbers and pro accounts) | Payment card and account details, processed entirely on Stripe's infrastructure. We never store card numbers. | Process plumber subscriptions and call-out payments. |
We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal data with any party for marketing or analytics purposes. We do not run advertising. We do not enrich your data against third-party data brokers.
Primary storage is in AWS Sydney. Limited cross-border transfer of personal data may occur in the following narrow cases:
We rely on contractual safeguards (AWS Customer Agreement, Anthropic Terms, Stripe DPA, Tuya DPA) and the Australian Privacy Principle 8 framework for cross-border disclosures.
Under the Australian Privacy Act 1988 (and the Australian Privacy Principles) you have the right to:
| Data type | Retention | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Account profile | For the life of your account, then 90 days | Reactivation grace; then deletion. |
| Sensor history | 5 years rolling | Anomaly baselining; insurance claim history. |
| Dispatch audit pack (when a claim fires) | 7 years | Australian insurance regulatory retention. |
| Photos | 2 years from upload | Tied to the dispatch they belong to. |
| Diagnostic logs | 30 days | Bug investigation; cost control. |
| SMS opt-out flag | Indefinitely | So we never SMS someone who opted out. |
We design with insurer-grade obligations in mind even in our pilot phase:
No system is perfectly secure. If we discover an incident affecting your data, we will follow Australian Notifiable Data Breaches obligations and tell you within the legal window.
AquaSentinel is built to onboard cleanly with Australian general insurers. We have aligned the platform with the obligations our foundation partners are bound by, including:
We do not yet hold ISO 27001 or SOC 2 certifications — these are deliberate roadmap items as we scale into a fully audited posture for the first foundation-partner pilot's transition to general availability.
This is a working pilot. Some of the privacy commitments above are operational today; some are actively being built. Honesty matters more than marketing here:
AquaSentinel is not directed at children under 16. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe a child has provided personal data to us, contact privacy@aquasentinel.pro and we will delete it.
If we materially change how we collect, use, or disclose your personal data we will update this page, bump the version number, and — for active users — send a one-time SMS or push to flag the change so you can review it. We will not retroactively apply new permissions to data already collected under an older policy.
Privacy questions, access or deletion requests: privacy@aquasentinel.pro.
General contact: hello@aquasentinel.pro.
Founders: brad · chris · michael · @aquasentinel.pro