The short version

We collect your email address and your name so we can send you The Beacon. We record which emails you open and which links you click. Our website records the usual technical information, such as your IP address.

The Beacon is free and paid for by advertising. Editions carry paid placements, and those are always identified. Sometimes we send you an offer we have selected. We send it ourselves, from our own system.

Apart from the service providers listed in section 8, we never give anyone your details. Not an advertiser, not a partner, not a related company, not for any price.

You can leave at any time using the unsubscribe link in every email. You can ask us what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it, by emailing [email protected].

1. We never sell or share the subscriber list

We never sell, rent, share or transfer the subscriber list, including to any company related to us. The only parties who ever hold it are beehiiv and SendGrid, the providers that operate the newsletter for us (section 8).

This is not a preference we could change quietly. It is how the newsletter is built. When a third party's offer reaches you, we sent it. It goes out from our system, under our sender name, to a list only we can see.

Advertisers and partners never receive your details. They do not get your email address, your name, or a record of what you clicked. They never see the list, and they never get a copy of any part of it.

If you ever receive an email from a company you did not subscribe to, and it appears to have come from your Beacon subscription, tell us. We want to know.

2. Who we are

The Beacon is a weekly email newsletter about Australian private credit and property debt. In this policy, "we", "us" and "our" mean The Beacon and the people who publish it.

You can reach us about anything in this policy at [email protected], or by post at Suite 202B, 39 East Esplanade, Manly NSW 2095, Australia.

3. Which privacy laws apply to us, and which do not

The Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles generally apply to organisations with an annual turnover above $3 million. We are below that threshold. The Act calls us a small business operator (section 6D), and small business operators are exempt. So the Privacy Act's main obligations do not bind us, and neither do the Australian Privacy Principles.

We have chosen to meet the Australian Privacy Principles as our standard anyway. This policy is written to that standard, and we intend to run the newsletter to it. We would rather hold ourselves to the same rules as a larger publisher than rely on an exemption you never agreed to.

If that changes, we will say so. If our turnover grows past the threshold, or if we become part of a larger group, the Privacy Act will start to apply to us. We will update this policy and re-date it when it does.

Some laws apply to us either way:

• The Spam Act 2003 (Cth) governs commercial email. It requires your consent, accurate identification of who is sending, and a working unsubscribe. It applies to us in full, and section 13 of this policy sets out what it means in practice.
• The Australian Consumer Law means the statements in this policy are enforceable against us. Where we cannot promise something, we say so.
• Serious invasions of privacy. Since 10 June 2025 Australian law has allowed a person to sue for a serious invasion of their privacy. There is no small business exemption from that.

4. What we collect

4.1 What you give us

When you subscribe, we collect your email address, your first name and your last name.

If you email us, we hold that message and your email address, along with anything you choose to put in it.

4.2 What we record about the emails we send you

Most newsletters do this without saying so. We would rather tell you.

The emails we send contain a small invisible image, usually called a tracking pixel, and every link you click passes through our email provider on the way to where it is going. Together these record:

• whether you opened an edition, and when;
• which links you clicked, and when;
• the IP address and the general type of device and email software you opened it on.

This information is tied to your email address, so it is information about you, not anonymous statistics. We treat it as personal information.

We use it to see which stories readers actually read, to decide what to write about, and to stop sending to addresses that have gone dead. We do not build a profile of you to sell, and we do not pass any of it to an advertiser. An advertiser is told how many people clicked. It is never told who.

Open tracking is approximate, not exact. Many email programs now block or pre-load these images, so the numbers we see are approximate. If you would rather not be counted at all, most email programs can be set to block remote images.

4.3 What our website records

When you visit our website or read an edition in the public archive, our hosting provider records standard technical information: your IP address, the pages you viewed, the time, your browser and device type, and the site you came from. The site also uses cookies and similar technology, for things such as keeping the site working properly and counting visits.

Most browsers let you block or delete cookies. The site will still work if you do.

4.4 What we do not collect

We do not ask for and do not want your date of birth, your address, your phone number, your income, your investments, or any government identifier. We do not collect payment details, because there is nothing to pay for. We do not collect sensitive information as that term is normally understood, such as health information or political views.

5. How we collect it

We collect information about you directly from you, when you fill in the subscribe form or email us, and automatically, through the email and website tracking described above. We do not buy lists, and we do not add anyone to the newsletter who did not ask for it.

6. What we use it for

We use your information to:

• send you The Beacon, and any occasional email described in section 7;
• address the newsletter to you by name;
• understand which stories readers read, so we can write better ones;
• keep our email deliverable, by removing addresses that bounce or go dead;
• reply to you when you contact us;
• keep a record that you subscribed, and when, which is what the Spam Act requires us to be able to show;
• meet our legal obligations, or respond to a lawful request from a court, regulator or law enforcement.

We do not use your information for any other purpose. If we ever want to, we will ask you first.

7. Advertising, and the offers we send

The Beacon is free. It is funded by advertising.

What that means for you:

• Editions contain paid placements. Those are always identified as advertising or sponsored, in the edition itself.
• We sometimes send offers we have selected. These may relate to our own products or services, to companies related to us, or to a third party whose offer we think is relevant to what you signed up for. They are always identified.
• We send every one of them ourselves. They come from our system, under our name. The third party never receives your details, and never gets to email you directly. See section 1 above.
• Every email we send has an unsubscribe link. Using it stops all of it.

We accept a flat fee for advertising. We do not take commission or any payment based on what you do after you click.

We may in future have an interest in other companies, including companies that operate in the markets we report on. Where that is the case, and where it is relevant to something we have published or to an offer we have sent you, we will say so at the time. It changes nothing about how we handle your information: those companies are covered by section 1 like everyone else, and they never receive the subscriber list.

8. Who we share information with

Three providers are involved in running the newsletter, and each holds your information only to operate it, under their published terms. Our own arrangements are with beehiiv, which runs the subscriber list and the platform, and with GitHub, which hosts the images in each edition. SendGrid is beehiiv's delivery provider rather than ours: beehiiv sends the emails through it, and we have no direct relationship with them.

Provider	What it does	Where
beehiiv	Runs the subscriber list, the newsletter platform and the public archive	United States
SendGrid	Delivers the emails	United States
GitHub Pages	Hosts the chart and photo images that appear in each edition, at assets.beaconnews.com.au. When your email program loads those images, GitHub receives your IP address and browser details. It never receives your email address or your name.	United States

Beyond those providers, we disclose personal information only where we are required or authorised by law to do so, for example in response to a court order or a lawful request from a regulator or law enforcement agency.

That is the complete list as at the effective date at the top of this page. There is no advertiser on it, no data broker, no analytics network selling audience segments, and no related company. If we ever add a provider we will update this table, and we will never add one that buys, sells or brokers subscriber data. See section 1.

9. Your information goes to the United States

Because beehiiv, SendGrid and GitHub are all based in the United States, we disclose your information overseas, to recipients in the United States. That is where our subscriber list is stored and where our email is sent from.

We want to be accurate about what that means. Once your information is held in the United States it is subject to United States law, which is different from Australian law and in some respects offers less protection.

We use established providers with published data-protection terms, and we rely on those published commitments about how the data is handled. We give them only what the job needs: your email address, your first name and your last name. They also generate and hold the delivery data described in sections 4.2 and 4.3: whether you opened an edition, what you clicked, and the IP address and device you used, because that is a by-product of sending email and running a website. All of it sits in the United States. We hold nothing else about you, so there is nothing else to send.

If you are not comfortable with your email address being held in the United States, please do not subscribe. Every version of this newsletter works this way.

10. Reading without telling us who you are

You can read The Beacon without telling us who you are. Every edition we publish is free to read at www.beaconnews.com.au, without a subscription and without an account. Keeping it that way is a deliberate commitment, not a temporary arrangement: we will not put it behind a paywall or a login. If we ever stop publishing altogether, we will say so in the newsletter first.

If you want the newsletter emailed to you, we need an email address, because there is no way to send an email without one. The address does not have to identify you. A pseudonym or an alias address is fine, and the name fields do not have to be your real name. We do not verify them and we will not chase you about it.

11. How long we keep your information

We keep your subscription details for as long as you are subscribed.

When you unsubscribe we stop sending immediately. Your record is then marked inactive in our newsletter system. It stays there, but it never receives another email from us, and we keep it that way so we can show that you subscribed and then withdrew, which we need to be able to show under the Spam Act.

If you would rather the record was deleted outright than left inactive, ask us at [email protected] and we will delete it. Please understand the trade-off. While the record is there it carries the fact that you unsubscribed, so we can see that you asked us to stop. Once it is deleted we have no record of that, so if your address came to us again we would have no way to know.

We also keep records we are required by law to keep, for as long as the law requires, including evidence of your consent to receive commercial email.

12. Security

We take reasonable steps to protect your information. We use established providers rather than building our own systems, we limit access to the very small number of people who need it, and we do not hold information we do not need. The less we hold, the less there is to lose.

We are not going to claim that our systems are impenetrable, because no one's are, and a policy that says otherwise is not being honest with you. If we are ever breached in a way likely to cause you serious harm, we will tell you as soon as we reasonably can. We will say what happened, and what we suggest you do about it. We commit to that voluntarily. The Notifiable Data Breaches scheme does not apply to us while the exemption in section 3 applies, so this is a promise we are choosing to make.

13. Unsubscribing

Every email we send carries an unsubscribe link. It works with one click, and it stops everything: the newsletter, any offer we send, all of it.

Under the Spam Act we must act on an unsubscribe request within five business days, and keep the unsubscribe facility working for at least 30 days after we send a message. In practice ours is immediate and permanent. If an unsubscribe link ever fails, email [email protected] and we will remove you by hand.

We will never make you log in, fill in a survey or explain yourself to leave.

14. Seeing and correcting what we hold

You can ask us for a copy of the personal information we hold about you, and you can ask us to correct anything that is wrong, at any time. Email [email protected].

We will respond within 30 days. Usually it is much faster, because there is not much to send: your email address, your name, when you subscribed, and your open and click history.

We do not charge for this. If we ever refuse a request, which we expect to be rare, we will tell you in writing why, and how to complain about it.

15. Complaints

If you think we have mishandled your personal information, tell us first. It is usually the fastest way to get it fixed.

How to complain: email [email protected], or write to Suite 202B, 39 East Esplanade, Manly NSW 2095, Australia. Put "Privacy complaint" in the subject line. Tell us what happened and what you want done about it.

How we will deal with it:

1. We will acknowledge your complaint within five business days of receiving it.
2. We will look into it. We may come back to you for more detail if we need it.
3. We will give you a written answer within 30 days, telling you what we found, what we have done, and what we will do differently.
4. If you are not satisfied with our answer, tell us and we will look at it again.

Sometimes those timeframes will not be possible. One of us may be away or ill, or the complaint may need information we have to go and get. If that happens we will tell you before the deadline passes, and give you a date we will meet.

If you want to take it further. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner handles privacy complaints about organisations that are covered by the Privacy Act. As explained in section 3, we are currently exempt from that Act, so the Commissioner may not be able to accept a complaint about us.

You are free to contact the Commissioner regardless, and if the office accepts a complaint about us, we will engage with it and cooperate fully. The OAIC is at www.oaic.gov.au or 1300 363 992. You may also have other rights at law, including the right to bring an action for a serious invasion of privacy.

If your complaint is about our emails (an unsubscribe that did not work, or email you did not consent to) the regulator is the Australian Communications and Media Authority. The Spam Act applies to us with no exemption, so that is a door that definitely opens. ACMA is at www.acma.gov.au.

16. Other websites

The Beacon links to other websites constantly. That is what a news publication does. Those sites are not ours. They have their own privacy policies and their own tracking, and we have no control over either. Once you arrive at another site, this policy stops applying to what happens there. The click itself we do record, as section 4.2 explains.

17. Children

The Beacon is written for adults, and it is not directed to anyone under 18. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe a child has subscribed, email [email protected] and we will remove the subscription.

18. Changes to this policy

We will update this policy when our practices change. The current version is always at www.beaconnews.com.au, and the effective date is at the top of the page.

If we make a change that materially affects how we handle your information, we will tell you in the newsletter before or when it takes effect.

If the publisher changes

The Beacon is published by the people behind it. In future, we hope to form a company to publish it instead. If that happens, the newsletter, this policy and your subscription would move across to that company.

This would be a change in who "we" are. It is not your details being handed to anyone else. The company would be us, publishing the same newsletter, bound by everything on this page, including the promise above that we never sell, rent or share the list. Nothing about what we hold, why we hold it, or who else can see it changes.

We will tell you in the newsletter before it takes effect, not afterwards, and you can unsubscribe at that point or at any other. If you would rather not come across, leaving costs you one click and we will not ask you why.

19. Contact us

Privacy questions, access requests, corrections and complaints:

• Email: [email protected]
• Post: Suite 202B, 39 East Esplanade, Manly NSW 2095, Australia
• Publisher: The Beacon