Privacy policy

Last updated 10 October 2026. This policy covers the Presift platform (presift.com.au and its apply pages).

1. Who we are and who this covers

Presift is software that rooming-house and share-house operators (“operators”) use to handle enquiries, applications, agreements, rent and notices. When you enquire about a room, apply, sign an agreement or live in a property managed with Presift, the operator collects your personal information and decides what to do with it. Presift stores and processes it on the operator’s behalf, and also holds the operator’s own account details. Both Presift and the operator are bound by the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles.

2. What we collect

If you enquire about a room

Your name, mobile number, email address and how you prefer to be contacted.
Your plans: when you want to move in, how long you plan to stay, your weekly budget, and who the room is for.
Your kind of work and your weekly income after tax. Both are optional.
Anything you write about yourself or ask, your preferred language, and the link or advert you came from.
A salted, one-way hash of your IP address, kept only to stop automated abuse of the form. The address itself is not stored.

If you apply for a room or sign an agreement

Photo identification, up to two documents showing your income, references and your current address, as the operator requests.
Your typed signature, the time you signed, a hash of the document you saw and a hash of your connection address, which together make the signing record.
A one-time code sent to your mobile before you sign, kept as a hash.

If you live in a property managed with Presift

Your agreement terms, rent and bond amounts, rent charges and payments, and notices given to or by you.
Messages exchanged with the operator by text, WhatsApp or email, and whether they were delivered.

If you are an operator

Your name, email, phone, business name, bank details shown on rent notices, sign-in details and subscription billing details (card details are held by Stripe, not by Presift).

We do not ask for, and operators may not request through Presift, bank statements showing transactions, bond or dispute history, or a police check. These are not permitted on a rooming-house application in Victoria.

3. Why we collect it

To respond to your enquiry and arrange an inspection.
To assess an application, prepare and sign an agreement, and record the bond.
To charge and track rent, send reminders you have agreed to receive, and give notices required by the Residential Tenancies Act 1997 (Vic).
To keep the records an operator must keep by law, and to run, secure and improve the platform.

4. Automated assessment of enquiries, and the human decision

When you send an enquiry, Presift compares some of your answers with limits the operator has set, to give the operator a recommendation. This is the only automated assessment of an individual that Presift performs, and here is exactly how it works.

What goes in

Your weekly budget, compared with the room’s weekly rent.
Your weekly income after tax, compared with the rent multiplied by a factor the operator chooses (between 1.5 and 3).
Your move-in date, compared with how soon the operator wants the room filled.
How long you plan to stay, compared with the operator’s shortest stay.
How many people the room is for, compared with the most the room is let to.

Your kind of work is shown to the operator but is never scored. Nothing you write in free text is scored. The assessment uses no artificial-intelligence model, builds no profile of you, and compares you with no one else.

What comes out

Each comparison is marked as meeting the limit, close to it, missing it, or unknown (if you left the answer blank; a blank never counts against you). The operator sees one of three recommendations: “looks a good fit”, “needs a look”, or “clear miss on their own numbers”, with each comparison written out in words.

Who decides

No decision is made automatically. A person at the operator reads the recommendation and decides whether to proceed or decline. Presift does not close an enquiry, send a decline, or rank you against other applicants on its own, and nothing about the outcome is sent to you until the operator acts. You can ask the operator why a recommendation was made and ask them to review it. Operators are required to make the final decision themselves and to consider anything you tell them.

Operators also use Presift’s AI assistant to draft routine messages. A draft is reviewed by the operator before it is sent, except the first acknowledgement of an enquiry and, where the operator has chosen it, a short first reply; those never contain decisions.

5. Who we share it with

Presift uses service providers to run the platform. They receive only what the service needs:

Hosting and database: Neon (Postgres) and our application host. See section 7 for where.
Text messages: Texto (Australia); and Twilio (USA) for WhatsApp.
Email: Resend (USA).
AI drafting: Anthropic (USA) receives the text needed to draft or read a message: first names, tenancy status, rent position and the words of a message. It does not receive identification documents, phone numbers or email addresses.
Electronic signing (when enabled): Annature (Australia).
Operator billing: Stripe (USA). Operator sign-in: Google or Microsoft if the operator chooses.
Bot protection (when enabled): Cloudflare.

We do not sell personal information and do not share it for advertising. We disclose it where the law requires, for example to the Residential Tenancies Bond Authority or a tribunal.

6. How long we keep it

Enquiry answers and the assessment: emptied 12 months after an enquiry closes without a tenancy.
Identification, income and reference documents: deleted 30 days after an unsuccessful application, or 30 days after you move in.
Agreements, notices and the signing record: 12 months after a tenancy ends, then kept only as the signing record the law requires.
Rent and bond records: 7 years, as financial records.
Messages: the life of the tenancy plus 2 years. AI drafting traces: 90 days.

7. Where it is stored and overseas disclosure

Presift’s database and application servers are in Australia (AWS Sydney, operated by Neon and Fly.io). Some service providers listed in section 5 are in the United States and receive only the information described there. We take reasonable steps to ensure each provider handles personal information consistently with the Australian Privacy Principles, including contractual terms and limiting what they receive.

8. How we protect it

Encryption in transit and at rest; every record is tied to one operator and isolated from every other, in code and in the database.
Documents are only ever downloadable by signed-in members of the operator that holds them, and every download is logged.
Operators sign in with multi-factor authentication. Public forms are protected against automated abuse.
Access by Presift staff is limited to named accounts and audited. We assess any suspected data breach under the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme and notify affected people and the OAIC where required.

9. Your rights

You can ask the operator, or us, for access to the personal information held about you and ask for it to be corrected. You can withdraw consent to be contacted at any time: reply STOP to a text, or tell the operator. You can ask the operator to explain and review any recommendation made about your enquiry. You can complain to us at the address below; if you are not satisfied, to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (oaic.gov.au, 1300 363 992).

10. Contact

Presift, privacy@presift.com.au. For information an operator holds about you, contact the operator first; their details are on every message they send you.