We take your privacy seriously. This policy explains exactly how we collect, use, and protect your personal information.
Nearness ("we", "us", "our") is an Australian business operating an AI-powered companion call service for older Australians. Our registered business name is Nearness, ABN 38 698 010 552, operating from Australia.
We are subject to the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs) which govern how we handle personal information.
For any privacy enquiries, contact us at: privacy@nearness.com.au
📞 Important: Nearness's AI will never ask your loved one for financial information, passwords, government ID numbers, or sensitive personal data during a call. If such information is volunteered, it is not stored or used.
We use personal information only for the purposes for which it was collected:
We do not use your information for advertising, marketing to third parties, profiling for commercial purposes, or any purpose unrelated to delivering this service.
Nearness conversations are processed in real-time by our AI voice platform. Transcripts and summaries are stored securely and linked to the client's profile.
⚠️ Note: By using Nearness, you consent to AI processing of your loved one's voice during calls for the purposes of delivering the service, generating transcripts, and detecting mood or distress signals. The call recipient is informed that Nearness is an AI service at the start of every call.
Transcripts are retained for up to 24 months and then securely deleted, unless required to be retained for legal or safeguarding reasons.
🤖 Automated decision-making: Nearness uses automated processing to detect mood and possible distress from call audio and to generate wellbeing summaries. The personal information used includes the call recipient’s voice, call transcript, and profile details. These automated assessments are used only to produce summaries for authorised contacts and to trigger wellbeing alert emails – they are not used to make any legal, financial, or eligibility decision about a person, and every wellbeing alert is reviewed and acted on by the human contacts you nominate. You may access, correct, or delete the underlying data as described in Section 7.
We take data security seriously. Our measures include:
In the event of a data breach that is likely to cause serious harm, we will notify affected individuals and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) in accordance with the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme.
We do not sell your personal information. We share information with the following third-party providers only as necessary to operate the service. Your information is now stored in Australia — our database moved from Tokyo to Sydney on 7 October 2026 — and our SMS delivery and telephone numbering are handled in Australia. Some information is still disclosed to providers in the United States: our application servers run there, and the AI that conducts and summarises calls is processed there. The country shown against each provider below is where that provider holds or processes the information, and each entry says what it receives and for how long. Under APP 8, Nearness remains accountable for how overseas recipients handle your personal information and requires each provider to maintain equivalent protections.
Call scheduling is managed internally by Nearness – no third-party automation tools are used for this purpose.
Your information is stored in Australia, but some of it still leaves the country, and we would rather say so plainly than imply otherwise. The conversation itself — the call audio, the transcript and the summary — is processed by Vapi and OpenAI in the United States, because neither offers that processing in Australia. Our application servers run in the United States, and the logs those servers produce are held in California for 90 days. Under Australian Privacy Principle 8 we take reasonable steps to ensure overseas recipients handle your information consistently with the Australian Privacy Principles, and under section 16C of the Privacy Act 1988 we remain accountable for how they do.
All third-party providers are contractually required to handle personal information in accordance with applicable privacy law and are prohibited from using your data for their own commercial purposes.
We may disclose information to law enforcement or government bodies if required by law, or if we believe disclosure is necessary to prevent serious harm to a person.
Under the Privacy Act 1988 and the Australian Privacy Principles, you have the right to:
To exercise any of these rights, contact us at privacy@nearness.com.au. We will respond within 30 days.
We do not use Google Analytics, advertising pixels, or any third-party analytics or tracking tools on this website. We do not build visitor profiles, and we do not sell or share browsing data. Browsing our public pages sets no cookies at all.
What the site does store, and why:
Our pages also load web fonts and software libraries from Google Fonts and jsDelivr. Those providers can see your IP address simply because your browser requests the file from them, in the same way as visiting any website. They set no cookies for us and receive no other information about you.
You can block or delete cookies in your browser settings. Blocking the Stripe cookies will prevent card payments from completing; nothing else on the site depends on cookies.
If we introduce website analytics in future, we will update this section and the "Last updated" date before doing so.
Nearness serves older Australians, who may be considered vulnerable persons. We apply additional care standards to data involving call recipients, including:
Sensitive information (as defined in the Privacy Act) collected incidentally during calls – such as references to health conditions – is treated with the highest level of care and is not used beyond delivering the Nearness service.
We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect changes in our service, technology, or legal requirements. When we make significant changes, we will notify subscribers by email and update the "Last updated" date at the top of this page.
Continued use of Nearness after a policy update constitutes acceptance of the revised terms.
If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy or how we handle your personal information, please contact us:
📧 Email: privacy@nearness.com.au
🌐 Website: nearness.com.au/contact
🏢 Nearness, Australia – ABN 38 698 010 552
You may also lodge a complaint with the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) at oaic.gov.au if you are not satisfied with our response.