Privacy Policy

The Flooring Centre operates the https://theflooringcentre.com.au/ website, which provides the Service.

This page is used to inform website visitors regarding our policies with the collection, use, and disclosure of Personal Information if anyone decided to use our Service, the The Flooring Centre website.

If you choose to use our Service, then you agree to the collection and use of information in relation with this policy. The Personal Information that we collect are used for providing and improving the Service. We will not use or share your information with anyone except as described in this Privacy Policy.

Information Collection and Use

For a better experience while using our Service, we may require you to provide us with certain personally identifiable information, including but not limited to your name, phone number, and postal address. The information that we collect will be used to contact or identify you.

Log Data

We want to inform you that whenever you visit our Service, we collect information that your browser sends to us that is called Log Data. This Log Data may include information such as your computer's Internet Protocol ("IP") address, browser version, pages of our Service that you visit, the time and date of your visit, the time spent on those pages, and other statistics.

Cookies

Cookies are files with small amount of data that is commonly used as an anonymous unique identifier. These are sent to your browser from the website that you visit and are stored on your computer's hard drive.

Our website uses these "cookies" to collect information and to improve our Service. You have the option to either accept or refuse these cookies, and know when a cookie is being sent to your computer. If you choose to refuse our cookies, you may not be able to use some portions of our Service.

Advertising Cookies and Remarketing

The Flooring Centre uses Google Ads remarketing to serve advertisements on third-party websites (including Google Search, YouTube, the Google Display Network, and Gmail) to previous visitors of our website. This means we may advertise to you on these third-party sites after you have visited our site.

Google and other third-party vendors use cookies, web beacons and similar technologies to record the fact that you visited our website and serve ads to you based on your past visits. The data collected is anonymous — no personally identifiable information is shared with Google for the purpose of these advertising activities.

Cross-border Data Handling

Some of the service providers we use (including AI providers, analytics platforms like Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity, advertising platforms, and cloud infrastructure) are based outside Australia. Under the Australian Privacy Principles (specifically APP 8), we are accountable for personal information disclosed to overseas recipients. We take the following steps to comply with APP 8:

• Analytics and advertising platforms. The data we share with analytics platforms like Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity, and with advertising platforms like Google Ads, is aggregated and de-identified behavioural data — not identifiable customer records. These platforms tell us how visitors interact with our website in general terms, but they do not receive your name, contact details, or account information from us.
• AI providers. Personal information is tokenised before any AI provider receives it, so overseas AI providers never receive identifiable personal information. Details are provided in the Use of Artificial Intelligence section below.
• Customer records overall. Customer records identifying you personally are held on Australian systems and on premises at The Flooring Centre's Melbourne showrooms. Where a service provider requires access to your details to perform their function (for example, our accounting software), we choose reputable providers with clear data handling standards consistent with the Australian Privacy Principles.

Google Analytics and Advertising Features

We use Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to understand how visitors use our website. GA4 is configured with Advertising Features enabled, which means we may use audience data collected through GA4 to inform advertising on Google's networks.

Microsoft Clarity (Session Recordings and Heatmaps)

We use Microsoft Clarity to better understand how visitors interact with our website. Clarity collects information about how you use our site, including mouse movements, clicks, scrolling, and the pages you visit, and creates anonymised session recordings and heatmaps. This information helps us identify usability issues and improve the experience for everyone. Clarity does not collect names, addresses, phone numbers, or other directly-identifying personal information, and sensitive form fields are automatically masked from recordings. Microsoft is the data processor for Clarity data. For more information, see the Microsoft Privacy Statement at https://privacy.microsoft.com/privacystatement.

How to Opt Out

You can opt out of personalised advertising at any time by:

• Visiting Google Ads Settings to control how Google personalises ads to you
• Visiting the Network Advertising Initiative opt-out page to opt out of multiple networks at once
• Adjusting your browser's cookie settings to refuse third-party cookies (note: this may affect your experience on many websites, not just ours)
• Visiting Microsoft's privacy controls to manage how Microsoft collects and uses your data, including Clarity behavioural analytics

Opting out of advertising cookies does not prevent advertisements from appearing — it just stops them from being personalised based on your previous browsing.

Service Providers

We may employ third-party companies and individuals to facilitate our Service, to provide the Service on our behalf, to perform Service-related services, or to assist us in analysing how our Service is used.

We want to inform our Service users that these third parties have access to your Personal Information. The reason is to perform the tasks assigned to them on our behalf. However, they are obligated not to disclose or use the information for any other purpose.

Use of Artificial Intelligence

We use artificial intelligence (AI) systems to help operate parts of our business — including customer communications, marketing content, quote preparation, and internal research. We believe transparency about how AI is used is a core part of respecting your privacy.

What we use AI for

• Drafting and sending customer communications, with human review applied to communications that warrant it
• Preparing marketing content, product descriptions, and articles for our website
• Website development and maintenance
• Preparing quotes and internal documents

What AI does NOT do

• Make final decisions about customer accounts, pricing, or eligibility for our services. All customer-facing decisions are made by a human at The Flooring Centre.
• Train on your personal information. We only use paid enterprise API access to AI providers, under commercial terms that specifically prohibit our data being used to train their models. We do not use free consumer AI apps for any customer-related work.
• Have access to your identifiable personal information in the form of your name, email address, phone number, ABN, or address.

How we protect your information when AI is involved

We have implemented a two-layer system to keep your personal information out of AI systems:

• Tokenisation and rehydration. Before any customer information leaves our internal systems for use with an AI provider, it is processed through a server hosted on The Flooring Centre's premises. That server replaces your personal information (name, contact details, address, ABN, etc.) with random reference codes ("tokens") that carry no personal meaning outside our internal systems. The AI provider only ever sees the tokens. When results come back, our local server rehydrates the tokens back into your actual information before it is used internally. Overseas AI providers never receive your personal information in an identifiable form.
• Zero Data Retention (ZDR). As a secondary safeguard, our AI providers are configured to operate under Zero Data Retention settings where available. Under ZDR, the AI provider does not retain the content of our requests or their responses beyond the immediate processing.

The combination of these two layers — data never leaves our internal systems in identifiable form, and even the tokenised data is not retained by the provider — reflects our commitment to Australian Privacy Principle 8 (Cross-border disclosure of personal information).

AI providers we use

• xAI (Grok)
• Anthropic (Claude)
• Perplexity

We do not permit any AI provider to have direct access to your personal information.

Security

We value your trust in providing us your Personal Information, thus we are striving to use commercially acceptable means of protecting it. But remember that no method of transmission over the internet, or method of electronic storage is 100% secure and reliable, and we cannot guarantee its absolute security.

For details on how we specifically protect your personal information when interacting with artificial intelligence systems, see the Use of Artificial Intelligence section above.

Links to Other Sites

Our Service may contain links to other sites. If you click on a third-party link, you will be directed to that site. Note that these external sites are not operated by us. Therefore, we strongly advise you to review the Privacy Policy of these websites. We have no control over, and assume no responsibility for the content, privacy policies, or practices of any third-party sites or services.

Children's Privacy

Our Services do not address anyone under the age of 13. We do not knowingly collect personal identifiable information from children under 13. In the case we discover that a child under 13 has provided us with personal information, we immediately delete this from our servers. If you are a parent or guardian and you are aware that your child has provided us with personal information, please contact us so that we will be able to do necessary actions.

Changes to This Privacy Policy

We may update our Privacy Policy from time to time. Thus, we advise you to review this page periodically for any changes. We will notify you of any changes by posting the new Privacy Policy on this page. These changes are effective immediately.

Contact Us

If you have any questions or suggestions about our Privacy Policy, do not hesitate to contact us.

(03) 9894 4688