Privacy Policy

Last updated: 19 October 2026

1. Who we are, and the scope of this policy

TowConnect ("we", "us") provides business-management software for towing and roadside operators. This policy states what information we collect, why we collect it, and how we handle it - both for the businesses that subscribe to TowConnect and for the people whose details those businesses record while running their operations.

TowConnect is operated by TOW CONNECT SOFTWARE PTY LTD · ABN 89 668 753 651 · Belmore NSW 2192.

We handle personal information in accordance with the Australian Privacy Principles under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth), and we hold ourselves to them whether or not the Act's small-business exemption would otherwise apply to us.

2. The information we collect

• Account information - on the creation of a workspace: your name, business name, email address, phone number, and workspace address.
• Billing information - subscription and payment details. When you enter a card, it passes from the payment form directly to our payment provider; we keep only the amount, the date, the card's brand and last four digits, and the provider's reference. Our payment provider is Stripe, which is certified as a PCI Service Provider Level 1; your card number never reaches our servers. Where your own customers pay you online through TowConnect, those payments are processed through your own payment provider account, and your customers' card details go to that provider rather than to us.
• Business data you enter - jobs, clients, vehicles, drivers, invoices, photographs and documents your business records while using TowConnect. This data belongs to you.
• The towing record itself - vehicle make, model, year, number plate and VIN; the times and places of a job and its status changes; the photographs your drivers take; damage notes; signatures and the time, network address and device from which a signing link was opened; and, where a workspace connects a GPS provider, the positions of its own trucks.
• Technical data - sign-in timestamps, IP addresses and the logs we require to keep the service secure and reliable.

Photographs of vehicles, number plates and damage are personal information about the people to whom those jobs relate, and we treat them accordingly.

3. How we use that information

• To provide, secure and improve the service.
• To send service emails that you request or that the service requires (verification codes, invoices you send, trial and billing notices).
• To respond when you contact us for support.

We do not sell personal information, we do not use your business data for advertising, and we do not train anything on it. We count information that cannot identify any person - the number of jobs the product handles in a week - in order to operate and improve the service.

No part of TowConnect decides of its own motion what to charge for a job, which truck to send, or how trustworthy a person is. One process does run automatically: the billing ladder in clause 7 of the Terms of Service, which moves an unpaid workspace to read-only and then locks it out on the days those terms set out. It operates on dates and amounts, and payment reverses it.

4. Cookies and browser storage

• A cookie that keeps you signed in, and the cookies our sign-in library requires in order to do that safely. The product cannot operate without them.
• A cookie that identifies this browser for two years, so that we can notify you when your workspace is signed into from a device it has not seen before. It holds a random number and nothing about you.
• When you sign in on our website's own sign-in page, a cookie that ties that sign-in to this browser, so that the link to your workspace works only where you typed your password. It holds a random number and nothing about you, lasts a few minutes at most, and is deleted as soon as you reach your workspace.
• When you connect your workspace to Google or Xero, a cookie that ties that connection to this browser, so that only the browser that started it can finish it. It holds a random number and nothing about you, lasts 15 minutes at most, and is deleted as soon as the connection finishes.
• Where you arrive from a referral link, one further cookie that records the referral code for 7 days.
• On the pages where you enter a card (Settings, then Plan and billing, in your workspace, and a payment link we send you), our payment provider, Stripe, runs its own code. It sets its own cookies and reads signals from your device and from how the page is used, to detect fraud, and it may show a verification check. Stripe handles that information under its own privacy policy and cookie policy, and does not use it for advertising.
• There are no advertising cookies, and no third-party analytics in your workspace or anywhere else in the product, other than the fraud checks our payment provider runs on the pages where you enter a card.
• On our public website only (not in your workspace, not on our sign-up, sign-in and demo pages, and not on any page that holds your jobs, clients or invoices), we use Google Analytics to count visits and see which pages help. It sets cookies in your browser and sends Google the pages you visit, the device and browser you use, and your internet address, which Google uses to work out your approximate location. Nothing you type into a form on the site, including the sign-up and demo boxes at the foot of each page, is sent to Google: it receives no names, no email addresses and no workspace data. To opt out, install Google's opt-out browser add-on; blocking cookies from this site in your browser stops Google recognising you between visits.
• For the duration of one visit, your browser retains the campaign codes contained in the address you arrived on - a Google click identifier and the utm tags - so that a demonstration request or a sign-up made a few pages later records which advertisement or link brought you. It identifies a campaign, not you, and it is discarded when you close the tab.
• While you are signing up, your browser keeps what you have already entered in that tab - your name, work email, business name, ABN and chosen address, with the token that proves you confirmed your email - so that a reload does not lose it. Your password and the emailed code are never kept. It is cleared when your workspace is created.
• Where a driver records an accident scene with no signal, that phone holds the details entered - the authorisation numbers, the people involved, and the rest of the form - until they reach us, and then removes them. Photographs are never held this way. The store is separate for each driver, so a truck handed over mid-shift cannot send one driver's work under another's sign-in.
• Your theme, text size and similar preferences are held by your own browser on your own device. They do not reach us.

5. Connected services (Google, Xero and other integrations)

If you connect a Gmail or Google Workspace account, TowConnect requests only the permission to send email on your behalf (the Gmail gmail.send scope) so that your invoices and notifications are sent from your own address. We store the authorisation token securely, use it solely to send the emails you trigger from TowConnect, and never read, store or analyse your mailbox. Disconnecting (one click in Settings → Connect → Email) deletes the token. TowConnect's use of information received from Google APIs complies with the Google API Services User Data Policy, including its Limited Use requirements.

If you connect your accounting software (currently Xero, with further providers to follow), TowConnect requests access only to the contacts and accounting transactions (invoices and payments) of the organisation you choose to authorise - nothing else in your accounting file. We use that access in the one direction you control: keeping the clients, invoices and payments you raise in TowConnect in sync with your accounting system, and reading back the payment status of those invoices so that both systems agree. The authorisation tokens are stored securely on our servers and are never shared. Disconnecting (one click on the Connect page in your workspace's settings) deletes the stored tokens and revokes TowConnect's access with the provider.

6. A sign-up that is started and not completed

The sign-up form asks for your name and email address first, and we retain them from that moment so that you can resume where you stopped. If the address is never confirmed, we delete that record after 30 days. If you confirm it but do not complete the workspace, we retain it for 180 days and then delete it.

While it is retained, we may email a confirmed address up to three times about the sign-up it began, and about nothing else. Each of those emails carries a one-click unsubscribe that stops them permanently. We do not sell or rent the address, we do not use it for advertising, and we do not add it to any other list.

7. Where your data is held, and for how long

• Your live workspace. Your workspace's business data is held in a database of its own, and that database and the application run on servers we rent in Sydney, Australia. It is reachable by the users you authorise, and by the minimal platform operations that running the service requires - backups, and support you have requested.
• Backups. We back up every database four times a day. Each backup is encrypted on our own server before it leaves it, with a key that never leaves that server, and the encrypted copy is stored overseas. Filenames are scrambled, so the file names disclose nothing either.
• Your own copy. You may export your workspace at any time from Data, then Export data, in your workspace, including while it is read-only, and we send a download of the data before we delete one.
• While the subscription runs. We retain your business data for as long as your workspace is open. A workspace you close yourself is retained for as long as you are likely to want it back, and if we ever need to set a limit on that we will notify its owner first, with the date and a download before anything is deleted.
• A workspace locked out for non-payment is kept for at least 180 days, and before we delete one we email its owner the deletion date and a download of the data - jobs, clients, accounts, invoices, storage records, trucks, drivers and photographs, and anything too large for a single archive will be sent on request - and then delete it.
• When something is deleted. Deletion removes data from the live workspace immediately. Encrypted backup copies made before that are locked against deletion for 30 days by the storage provider, and expire of their own accord after that.
• Records about running the service - sign-in history, email delivery logs, error records and alerts - each have a retention period set in our platform settings, and a nightly sweep removes anything past it. We do not retain them indefinitely.

Statutory registers are not in the export, or in the download we send before a deletion. They are approved-form documents printed from the Registers page inside the workspace. Print the packs you are required to keep while your workspace is open.

8. Who else handles it, and for what purpose

We disclose information to the companies below, each limited to the one job it does, to any service you connect yourself (clause 5), and where the law requires it. We do not sell or rent it to anyone. If we add a company to this list, we will notify workspace owners at least 14 days before it begins.

• Stripe - Charges your subscription, and processes the card payments your own customers make to you. United States.
• Amazon Web Services - Sends the email your workspace sends when you have not connected a mailbox of your own, from servers in the Sydney region. Australia.
• Google - Address search, maps and routes, the email TowConnect sends you about your own account, sending your workspace's email if you connect a Google account, and counting visits to our public website. United States.
• WhatsApp LLC (Meta) - Sends a tow company's job updates from that company's own number, once the company connects it to the WhatsApp Business Platform. The customer's phone number, the message text, delivery and read states, and replies pass between the company, TowConnect and Meta. For a company in Meta's European Region, the provider is WhatsApp Ireland Limited. The United States and the European Economic Area, among the other countries where Meta and its sub-processors operate.
• Twilio - Delivers the text messages a workspace sends, on that workspace's own Twilio account. United States.
• Verizon Connect - Reads your own vehicles' positions, for a workspace that has connected a GPS provider. United States or Europe.
• Backblaze - Holds the encrypted off-site copies of our backups. It receives ciphertext; we hold the key. Germany.
• Vultr - Runs the servers your workspace, its database and the application sit on. Australia.
• Cloudflare - Answers the name look-ups for our domains. Your workspace's traffic does not pass through it. United States.
• OpenStreetMap Foundation - Serves the map tiles the fleet view and the location pages are drawn from. United Kingdom and Europe.

Error tracking is our own, on our own infrastructure: what broke, when, and on which page.

9. Information that goes overseas

• The list in clause 8 states which country each company handles information in. Three of those flows leave Australia in the ordinary course: the encrypted backup copies, the map and address look-ups your browser makes, and the messages a workspace chooses to send.
• Before information reaches any of them we take the steps Australian Privacy Principle 8 requires: we send only what the job needs, we use accounts and contracts that limit each company to that job, and we hold them to handling standards no lower than the ones in this policy.
• The backup copies are the strongest case: what crosses the border is ciphertext with scrambled filenames, encrypted before it leaves our server with a key that never leaves it, and the storage provider only ever holds the file.
• Where a workspace connects a GPS provider, its own trucks' positions are read from that provider's servers overseas. That flow exists only for workspaces that turn it on.

10. Security, and notification of a breach

• Traffic to and from TowConnect is encrypted. Backups are encrypted before they leave our servers. Each workspace's business data sits in its own database, and sign-ins are logged.
• Our own access is limited to what running the service and answering your support requests requires, and it is recorded.
• No system is beyond reach. If we become aware of a breach that affects your workspace's data, we will tell you as soon as practicable and give you what you need to decide who else must be told.
• The Notifiable Data Breaches scheme in Part IIIC of the Privacy Act can make a breach notifiable to affected people and to the regulator. Where your workspace is involved, both parties hold that information and only one of them needs to notify: we will agree which of us it is, and neither party ceases to be responsible because the other did it.

11. Personal information your business records

For the personal information a towing business records in its workspace - its customers, their vehicles, the photographs and signatures taken on a job - that business decides what is collected and for what purpose. In the language of privacy law it is the controller, and we process the information on its behalf and on its instructions. We use it to operate the service for that business and for nothing else: not for advertising, not for training anything, and never to sell.

Certain obligations are therefore the operator's and not ours: collecting lawfully, informing people what is being done with their information, keeping it accurate, and answering them when they ask to see or correct it. Clause 14 of the Terms of Service sets those out.

12. Access, correction and complaints

• You may see and correct your data at any time in your workspace, and export it at any time from Data, then Export data. You may require us to delete your workspace and its data by writing to support@towconnect.co.
• If you consider that we have mishandled your information, write to support@towconnect.co. We will investigate and reply within 30 days.
• If our answer does not satisfy you, you may complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC), the Australian privacy regulator, at oaic.gov.au.
• TowConnect is built for Australian operators and is operated from Australia, so your information is handled here under Australian law and this policy. If you are in a place whose law gives you further rights over your information, write to us and we will work out how to give effect to them.

13. Individuals whose details a towing business holds

If your vehicle was towed and the operator uses TowConnect, your name, contact details, vehicle, photographs and signature are held in that operator's own workspace. The operator is the party to contact first to see, correct or remove them, and we act on that operator's instructions. A signing link opened from a text message or an email also records the time, network address and device from which it was signed; that record exists to protect the record for both sides. If you cannot reach the operator, write to support@towconnect.co and we will pass your request to them.

TowConnect is a product for businesses. It is not intended for children, nothing in it is directed at them, and we do not knowingly collect information about a person under 16 except where a towing business has recorded it as part of a job.

14. Changes to this policy, and how to contact us

Enquiries about this policy, or a request to see, correct or delete what we hold about you: support@towconnect.co. Every other way to reach us is set out on the Contact page.

If we make material changes, we will record the new date at the top of this page and notify workspace owners by email at least 30 days before they take effect.