What Carol knows about your mum or dad, and what she cannot know.
Last updated 4 October 2026
Jon Oates, trading as Carol Says, ABN 62 986 483 142 ("we", "us"), makes Carol: an iPhone app that speaks reminders and family messages aloud to an older person, and a web console their family uses to set it up.
We handle personal information in accordance with the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles. We do this whether or not the Act strictly requires it of a business our size. It costs us little and we would rather not argue about the edges of an exemption when the people involved are somebody's parents.
The person Carol speaks to is usually not the person who bought her. An adult child buys Carol, sets her up and receives a weekly note. Their parent uses her. The parent has no account, no password and nothing to log into.
So we do not ask that person to agree to anything they have not been told out loud. On the first day, with their family in the room, Carol says:
I only ever say what your family types. I'll never ask you for money, or for a number, or to ring anyone but them. That green button is all there is. Press it when you've heard me, and your daughter will know we spoke.
We record the date that was said. And they can see, on their own phone, exactly what their family sees.
Whether the volume is down, whether notifications are off, and which voice is installed, so the app can say why Carol cannot be heard.
These are not undertakings about our intentions. They are things the software is built so as not to be able to do.
From the family member, typed into the console or into the app during setup. From the parent, only by their pressing one button. They are never asked to type or supply anything.
We never collect personal information from anybody else. No data brokers, no address book uploads, no social sign-in, no purchased lists.
We do not use personal information for advertising, profiling, scoring, training machine learning models, or any inference about anybody's health. We do not sell personal information and we will not.
We send the family member a weekly note saying how the week went, and email about their account. If you joined our list before buying, we email you when Carol is ready.
Every message carries a one-click way to stop it, with no login and no form. Once stopped it does not start again by itself, and we do not send anything asking you to reconsider.
To the family member who set Carol up: whether their parent answered, when they asked for quiet, and which reminders they turned off. This is the service being bought, and the parent is told of it in Carol's own words on the first day.
To providers acting on our instructions and bound to handle it consistently with the Australian Privacy Principles: our hosting and database provider, our email provider, and our payment provider.
We do not give personal information to advertisers, insurers, employers, aged care providers, health services or government, except where a law compels us.
Your parent's information is stored in Australia. We chose an Australian region for our database deliberately.
Two providers may process some information outside Australia, in the United States: our payment provider, Stripe, which handles the purchase, and our email provider, Resend, which delivers the weekly note. Before using an overseas provider we take reasonable steps to ensure it handles personal information consistently with the Australian Privacy Principles.
We take reasonable steps to protect personal information from misuse, loss and unauthorised access: access controls, encryption in transit and at rest, multi-factor authentication on administrative accounts, and secure deletion.
Two choices reduce the risk rather than manage it. The family member signs in with a link sent to their email instead of a password, so there is no password to steal, guess or reuse. And the reminders run on the phone itself, so the app keeps working even when it cannot reach us — which also means less of your parent's day depends on our servers being up.
If a breach of personal information is likely to cause serious harm and we cannot prevent that harm, we will tell the people affected and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner as soon as practicable, under the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme.
If your parent dies, moves into care, or can no longer use Carol, tell us. We refund the unused part, stop everything, and do not ask you why. If you would rather keep the messages your family wrote, we will send them to you instead of deleting them — at that point it is a small archive of somebody's last year, and it should be yours.
Our website sets no advertising cookies and carries no tracking pixels. We count visits in aggregate so we know whether anybody is reading the page. We do not build a profile of you and we do not follow you to other sites.
You can ask us a question without telling us who you are. You cannot use Carol anonymously, because the whole service is sending a named person's family a note about them — there is no version of it that works without a name and an email address.
You can ask for a copy of what we hold about you, or ask us to correct it. There is no charge. We aim to respond within 30 days.
The person Carol speaks to can see their own record any time, on their own phone, on the "This week" screen. They do not need to ask us and they do not need an account.
And they can ask us to delete it themselves. They do not need the permission of whoever bought Carol, and we will not ask them to get it. It is their information. We will tell the family member that the account has closed at their parent's request, and we will refund the unused part.
We do not make automated decisions about anybody. Carol writes a weekly note without a human reading it first, but a note is information for a family member, not a decision about their parent: nothing is granted, refused, scored or withheld, and nothing happens automatically as a result. What to do about it is always a person's judgement, never ours.
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your personal information, write to our Privacy Officer below. We will acknowledge it promptly and respond within 30 days.
If our answer does not satisfy you, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner: oaic.gov.au, 1300 363 992, or GPO Box 5288, Sydney NSW 2001.
Privacy Officer
Jon Oates, trading as Carol Says, ABN 62 986 483 142
PO Box 101, Randwick NSW 2031
hello@carolsays.com.au
We may update this policy. The current version is always here and the date at the top shows when it last changed. If we ever change it in a way that matters, we will email you rather than quietly swapping the page.