Legal
Mercureal Privacy Policy
Contents
1. Who we are
Mercureal is a customer-relationship platform for real-estate agencies, built and operated by Jiayu Wang, trading as Aether Forge Studio (ABN 69 806 202 466) (“we”, “us”). We provide the Mercureal web application at mercureal.com and the Mercureal mobile app (together, the “Service”).
We handle personal information in accordance with the Australian Privacy Principles under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth). You can reach us about anything in this policy at support@mercureal.com.
2. What this policy covers
This policy covers personal information processed through the Service: the accounts of agency staff who sign in, the client records agencies keep in Mercureal, and the details buyers submit when they check in at an open home using a Mercureal check-in code. It also covers our websites, including this one.
It does not cover what a real-estate agency does with information outside Mercureal — that is governed by the agency's own privacy policy.
Anonymity. You can browse our public websites without identifying yourself. Using the Service itself requires an identifiable account, and an open-home check-in requires real contact details — those features can't practicably work anonymously.
3. Information we collect
Account information
When an agency signs up or invites a team member, we collect the account holder's name, email address, phone number (optional), role within the agency, and — for licensed agents — a licence number if provided. Sign-in is handled through a managed identity service; we never see or store your password in our own database.
Agency content
Agencies use Mercureal to run their business, and the records they create are stored by us on their behalf. This includes property listings, contact records for their clients (names, phone numbers, email addresses, buyer preferences such as budget and preferred suburbs), notes, tasks, appointment schedules, interaction history, photos, and files. Some of these records contain the personal information of people who are not Mercureal users — see section 11.
These records arrive in three ways: agency staff type them in, an agency imports its existing client book from a CSV file, or an agency connects its inquiry channels so that portal inquiry emails are filed automatically. However a record arrives, it is treated the same way under this policy.
Sensitive information and identifiers
Apart from the real-estate licence number an agent may choose to provide as part of their account information (above), Mercureal has no fields for — and does not ask for — government identifiers such as passports, driver's licences, or tax file numbers, nor sensitive information as defined by the Privacy Act (such as health, racial or religious information). We ask agencies not to place such details in free-text notes. A buyer's self-reported finance status at a check-in (for example “pre-approved”) is held as part of the hosting agency's check-in record.
Billing information
Paid subscriptions are billed through Stripe. Card details go directly to Stripe and never touch our servers; we hold your plan, billing contact, and invoice history.
Open-home check-ins
When you check in at an open home — either on the agent's device or by scanning a QR code on your own phone — you submit your name and contact details, and optionally your buying intent and finance status. That information goes into the check-in record of the hosting agency and becomes part of their client records.
Portal enquiry emails
An agent can create a private Mercureal forwarding address and set their own mailbox to forward portal enquiry emails (for example from realestate.com.au or Domain) to it. When such an email arrives we extract the enquirer's name, contact details and message so the enquiry appears in the hosting agency's CRM — either as an inquiry record, or in a review queue for the agent to confirm. The original email is kept only for a short window (section 9). Enquiry details received this way are used to respond to the enquiry and are otherwise handled as the hosting agency's client records, consistent with the use limitations the portals attach to enquiry emails under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth).
AI assistant interactions
When you ask the built-in assistant a question, we send it — together with relevant context from your account for that day, such as your open-home schedule, your open follow-up tasks, and the names of your key contacts — to our AI provider to generate a response. When you use import-mapping suggestions, we send the column headers and a few sample values from the file to our AI provider. See section 5 for which providers. Your conversations with the assistant are saved as a chat history on our servers — they are private to you, and kept for 30 days (section 9). You can read them back in the mobile app. We also keep a daily usage count per account to enforce fair-use limits.
Mobile app notifications
If you allow notifications in the Mercureal mobile app, we store a push-notification token for each of your devices, and whether it is an iPhone or an Android device, so we can send the follow-up reminders you have set. The reminder text contains counts only (for example “2 due today · 1 overdue”) — never a client's name or details. Notifications are relayed by Expo and delivered by Apple or Google (section 6). When you sign out on a device, the app asks us to remove that device's token; for what happens when you delete your account, see section 9.
Caller ID on iPhone
If you turn on Caller ID in the iPhone app, the names and phone numbers of your agency's contacts — labelled with whether they are, for example, a buyer or a seller — are copied into the caller-identification directory that iPhone keeps on the device, so incoming calls from those contacts show who is calling. That copy is stored by iOS on your phone for this purpose only. It is refreshed as your agency's contacts change, and cleared when you sign out or switch to a different agency.
Technical information
Like most online services we keep server logs (IP address, request time, errors) for security and troubleshooting. The Service contains no advertising and no third-party tracking or analytics SDKs.
4. How we use information
- To provide the Service — storing and displaying agency records, matching buyers to listings, sending, on the agency's behalf, the confirmation a buyer's open-home check-in triggers and the inspection reports an agent sends to vendors, and syncing between the web and mobile apps.
- To operate accounts — authentication, team invitations, subscription management, and support.
- To keep the Service safe — enforcing per-agency data isolation, rate limits and quotas, and investigating abuse.
- To improve the Service — aggregate, de-identified usage measures (for example, how many check-ins happened, never who checked in where).
We do not sell personal information. We do not use your data for advertising. We do not use your agency's records to train AI models.
Emails. The emails we send on our own behalf are operational — team invitations, trial and billing notices, and account or service notices. We don't send marketing email, and we don't track whether you open our emails. Separately, the Service sends two kinds of email to people whose details an agency stores, on that agency's behalf and because of how the agency uses the Service: the confirmation a buyer gets when they check in at an open home, and an inspection report an agent chooses to send to a vendor. Each is sent under the agent's name, with replies going to the agent — except a check-in confirmation for a listing with no agent assigned, which comes from our own address. The laws that govern those emails — including the Spam Act 2003 (Cth), where it applies — apply to the agency as the sender, as our Terms of Service (section 5) describe, and we'll update this policy before the Service sends any other kind. If we ever introduce marketing email of our own it will be opt-in, with a working unsubscribe link in every message.
Automated decisions. We don't use a computer program to make a decision about a person solely by automated means that could reasonably be expected to significantly affect their rights or interests. Buyer–listing matches, follow-up reminders, and AI suggestions are shown to an agent, who decides what to do with them. If that changes, we'll update this policy before it does.
5. AI features
Mercureal's two AI features both use one provider, Anthropic:
- The AI assistant is powered by Anthropic's Claude API. Your question and the account context described in section 3 are processed by Anthropic to produce the reply.
- CSV import-mapping suggestions are powered by Anthropic's Claude API. The column headers and sample values from the file you're importing are processed by Anthropic to suggest how columns map to Mercureal's fields.
The assistant's account context can include the names of an agency's clients, and import samples can include personal information. We use Anthropic under paid API terms that prohibit using submitted content to train its models, and we don't use agency records, questions, or AI output to train AI models ourselves. Both features are optional; if your agency doesn't use them, no data is sent to Anthropic.
AI responses are generated automatically and can be wrong. They are informational only — verify anything important before acting on it.
7. Where your data lives
The Service's databases and file storage are hosted in Sydney, Australia (AWS region ap-southeast-2). Some processing happens outside Australia: AI requests — assistant questions (with their account context) and CSV import-mapping suggestions are processed by Anthropic in the United States — and mobile push notifications, where a device's push token and the notification text (counts only, no client details) are relayed by Expo in the United States and delivered by Apple or Google. Before personal information goes to a provider outside Australia, we take reasonable steps to make sure the provider handles it consistently with the Australian Privacy Principles (APP 8.1): we use providers whose terms restrict what they may do with what we send and require them to protect it, and we remain accountable for how they handle it. Every provider and where it operates is listed in section 6.
8. How we protect it
- All traffic between your device and the Service is encrypted in transit (TLS), and data is encrypted at rest.
- Every agency's data is isolated from every other agency's, enforced at the database layer — not just in application code.
- Sign-in is delegated to a managed identity provider; passwords never touch our database.
- Access within an agency follows roles: for example, only agency administrators can export the client book or manage billing.
No online service can promise perfect security. If we become aware of unauthorised access to, unauthorised disclosure of, or loss of an agency's records, we tell the agency's administrators within 72 hours of becoming aware, however serious it looks, as our Terms of Service (section 13) describe, and agree with the agency who tells its clients so that they are told; if the agency no longer exists or can't be reached, we tell them ourselves. Separately, if we suspect a breach of personal information that could cause serious harm, we assess it promptly and finish within 30 days of first suspecting it; if it is likely to cause serious harm and we can't remove that risk, we notify the OAIC and make sure the people affected are told, as soon as practicable, in line with the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme.
9. Retention and deletion
- While your subscription is active, we keep your agency's records so the Service works.
- Deleted records (for example, a contact an agent deletes) appear in a “Recently deleted” view for 30 days, during which they can be restored. After that they are permanently purged within a further recovery buffer — no later than 60 days from deletion.
- Account deletion: you can delete your account from inside the app (Settings → Delete account), or by emailing support@mercureal.com from your account email. Deletion disables sign-in immediately. A 30-day grace period follows so an accidental deletion can be undone — contact support within those 30 days to cancel. At the end of the grace period your personal details (name, email address, phone number, sign-in identity, device push-notification tokens, and any connected credentials) are permanently erased. Reminder notifications stop as soon as deletion is requested.
- Agency business records: where you are the agency's owner, deleting your account closes the whole agency — and deleting your account also closes any other agency you are the only administrator of, on the same terms. The agency's business records — listings, transaction history, and open-home check-in registers — are retained for up to 3 years after closure, and are then permanently deleted. Keeping records for as long as a licence requires is the agency's own obligation — in NSW, generally 3 years — so an agency should take a copy before it closes: on a paid plan, in-app export covers contacts, listings and inquiries, and on any plan support@mercureal.com will send a full copy on request, open-home check-in registers and transaction history included. Once an agency is closed, its team members can no longer access it. A team member for whom it was their only workspace has their sign-in access ended and their personal sign-in details erased at the end of the grace period; a team member who also belongs to another agency keeps their account and that agency, and loses access only to the closed one. A team member deleting only their own account removes their access and personal details; the agency's records are unaffected.
- Forwarded enquiry emails: the raw forwarded email is kept for at most 30 days, then deleted. Where the enquiry was filed as an inquiry record, or was discarded by the agent, the personal details extracted from the email are also removed after 30 days — any surviving inquiry record then carries the enquiry under the normal agency-record rules above. An enquiry still awaiting the agent's review keeps its extracted details until it is actioned, like any other open enquiry.
- Assistant conversations: your chat history with the built-in assistant is kept for 30 days from the last message in a conversation, then deleted automatically. A conversation is private to the person who had it — other members of your agency, including administrators, cannot read it. You can delete a single conversation, or clear your whole history, at any time from inside the app.
- Backups rotate out on a fixed schedule, so purged data also leaves our backups within a bounded window.
10. Your rights
Under the Australian Privacy Principles you have rights over the personal information we hold about you. With Mercureal, most of them are built into the product:
- Access — your account details are visible in the app. For a copy of everything we hold about you, email us and we'll provide it within 30 days.
- Correction — edit your own details in the app at any time, or ask us to correct anything you can't reach yourself.
- Deletion — delete your account from inside the app (Settings → Delete account) or by email; section 9 describes exactly what is erased and when.
- Export — agency administrators can export the agency's client book as a CSV from inside the app while on any paid plan, and for a further 30 days after that subscription ends; on any plan, account holders can request a copy of their data by email.
- Complaint — tell us what went wrong and we'll investigate and respond within 30 days.
Exercising any of these rights is free, and we will never penalise or disadvantage you for doing so — though naturally, deleting your account ends your access to the Service itself, as section 9 describes. To protect your information, we may first need to verify that a request genuinely comes from you (for example, by asking you to write from your account email); a parent, guardian, or authorised representative can act for you with evidence of their authority.
If you're not satisfied with our response, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (oaic.gov.au).
11. If an agency holds your details in Mercureal
Real-estate agencies use Mercureal to keep records about their clients — buyers, sellers, tenants, and landlords. If you're one of those people, the agency is responsible for that data and for having a lawful basis to hold it; we store and process it on the agency's behalf and don't use it for our own purposes.
To access, correct, or delete details an agency holds about you, contact that agency directly — its name is shown on the open-home check-in page, and when the listing has an agent, the agent's name and contact details are in the confirmation email and any other correspondence they've sent you. If you believe an agency is misusing Mercureal to handle your information, you can also report it to us at support@mercureal.com and we will investigate under our Terms of Service.
12. Children
The Service is a business tool and is not directed at children under 16. We don't knowingly collect children's personal information; if you believe a child's details have ended up in the Service, contact us and we'll remove them.
14. Changes to this policy
When we change this policy we'll update the date at the top. A material change is treated as a change to our Terms of Service: we'll notify account holders by email or in the app at least 14 days before it takes effect, and section 16 of the Terms applies — including the right to cancel and get a refund of the prepaid, unused portion of a subscription if the change materially disadvantages you. Changes that only add to your protections take effect when they're published. The current version always lives at mercureal.com/privacy.
15. Contact us
Jiayu Wang, trading as Aether Forge Studio (ABN 69 806 202 466)
Email: support@mercureal.com