Privacy Policy

Effective 18 September 2026.

The Middle Child is an app for buying and selling second-hand baby gear in Australia. It is operated by Michael Fernandopulle, trading as The Middle Child Market, ABN 39 190 810 642. In this policy, "we", "us" and "TMC" mean that business.

This policy explains what we collect, why, who else ends up holding it, and what happens when you delete your account. We handle personal information in accordance with the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles.

Contact for anything in this policy: milarkventures@gmail.com

The short version

• Your data lives in Australia. Our database and file storage are hosted in Sydney.
• We never see your card number. Card details go straight to Stripe from your phone.
• We do not collect a delivery address. Not at checkout, not on an order, nowhere.
• Other people see your first name or display name, your suburb, state and postcode — not your street address and not your exact location.
• There is no analytics, no advertising, no tracking of any kind in the app.
• You can delete your account from inside the app. Some records have to stay, and the app tells you what is kept before you press the button.

1. What we collect

When you create an account

Your email address, and a display name. There is no password; we email you a six-digit code instead.

If you sign in with Apple or with Google, that provider authenticates you and tells us your name, an email address, and an identifier for the account you signed in with, so we recognise you next time. With Apple the address may be its private relay address if you chose that; with Google it is the address on your Google account. Nothing else reaches us, and your password for either never does.

You can optionally add a short bio and a profile photo.

When you set your area

Once, during setup, the app asks for your location while you are using it. It is used immediately to work out which suburb you are in. That conversion from coordinates to a place name is done by Apple's location services on your device, which means your coordinates are sent to Apple to do it. Apple handles that under its own privacy policy. We use no other mapping or geocoding service, and we do not send your coordinates anywhere else.

What we store from that is your suburb, state and postcode. Your feed uses this to show you things nearby, and other members see a rough distance ("about 4 km away"). If you would rather not share location at all, you can type a suburb instead.

When you list something

The title, description, brand, model, condition, any flaws you declare, what is included, the price, how you will hand it over, and up to eight photos. Each category also asks its own questions before a listing can go live — what type of thing it is, and the safety declarations that category requires — and we store those answers with the listing.

Listings also store the suburb, state, postcode and a coordinate for the item so that distance search works. Where you allowed location access and did not type over the detected suburb, that coordinate can be the location your phone reported (accurate to roughly 100 metres) rather than the centre of the suburb. It is never displayed to anyone — only an approximate distance is — but it is stored.

About your photos: photos are stored privately and served through links that expire after an hour. We do not currently strip the metadata that your camera writes into an image file, which on some phones can include the location where the photo was taken. If that matters to you, photograph the item somewhere you do not mind, or turn off location data for your camera app.

When you set your pickup times

If you sell, you can say which days and times of the week you are free for a pickup, and how far ahead you are willing to book. We store that pattern on your account and reuse it on every order, rather than asking you again each time. Any signed-in member can read it; a buyer who has placed a hold on your item is only ever shown the part of it that falls inside that order's window.

When you buy or sell

For each order we keep the item price, postage, the TMC platform fee, the total, what the seller receives, the currency, and the timestamps of everything that happened. Orders placed before 7 September 2026 also carry the separate card processing charge that our earlier fee schedule passed through, because an order keeps the figures it was made under. We also keep the Stripe identifiers for the payment, the transfer to the seller, any refund and any dispute.

For posted items we keep the carrier and tracking number the seller enters. For pickups we keep the time you both agreed and a six-digit collection code.

We do not collect a delivery address. The seller gets the address from you directly in the message thread, and posts the item themselves.

Messages

Messages between buyers and sellers are stored on our servers so both people can read them. We keep the message text, who sent it, and when. A short preview of the most recent message is stored alongside the conversation so it can be shown in your inbox.

Please treat the thread as what it is — a written record. Pickup addresses and phone numbers get exchanged there, and they stay there.

Notifications and your device

If you turn on notifications we store a push token for that device, along with the device model name (for example "iPhone 15") and the app version, so we know which device a notification failed on.

Push notifications are sent through Expo, which relays them to Apple. The text of a notification is sent to those services and can appear on your lock screen, and it can contain the other person's display name, the listing title, an offer amount, the number of new listings matching a saved search, and up to the first 200 characters of a message. Turn off notification previews in iOS Settings if that is not what you want on a lock screen.

When you raise an issue on a posted order

If a posted item does not arrive or is not what the listing said, you can raise an issue in the app. We keep the reason you chose, what you wrote (up to 1,000 characters), and the photographs you attach — which are required for every reason except a parcel that never arrived. When the seller answers we keep their side and their photographs the same way, and we keep our decision and the reason for it.

Those photographs are kept in a separate private store from listing photos. Only the two of you and we can read them, and neither of you can delete or replace one once it is in — evidence somebody could change after the other side had seen it would not be evidence.

Ratings

When a sale completes you can rate the other person from 1 to 5. We keep the score, which side of the order you were on, and when it was revealed. There is no comment field. Your average and the number of ratings behind it are shown on your profile, and only revealed ratings are counted in it.

Saved searches

If you save a search we store the filters it was built from — the words, categories, condition, brand, model, price range and handover method. If that search had a distance limit, we also store the coordinates you were at when you saved it, because an alert that runs later has no other honest place to measure a distance from. A search with no distance limit stores no coordinates.

We also keep when we last alerted you about it, so we do not alert you more than once every six hours. You can rename it, turn its alerts off, or delete it, and deleting it removes the row.

Reports and blocks

If you report a listing, a message or a person, we keep your report — the reason, what you wrote, who and what it was about, and how it was resolved. If you block someone, we keep that too. The person you blocked is never told.

Payment records from Stripe

When Stripe tells us something happened to a payment, we store the message it sends us. Those messages are generated by Stripe and can include details such as the brand and last four digits of a card, and the billing details Stripe collected. We do not receive or store a full card number at any point.

What we do not collect

• Card numbers, CVCs or expiry dates
• Bank account details or identity documents (these go directly to Stripe)
• Delivery or street addresses
• Contacts, calendar, microphone, or photos other than the ones you attach to a listing
• Any analytics, behavioural, advertising or crash-reporting data. There is no analytics provider, no advertising SDK and no third-party tracker in the app.

2. How we use it

To run your account and sign you in; to show listings to the right people; to take payment, hold it and pay the seller; to run the clocks that orders depend on; to send you notifications about your own orders, offers and messages; to tell you when something new matches a search you saved; to answer you when you contact us; to investigate reports and issues raised on orders, and to keep prohibited and recalled items off the platform; and to keep the records the law requires us to keep.

We do not use your information for advertising, we do not profile you, and we do not sell or rent it to anyone.

3. Who else holds your information

We use a small number of service providers. Each is listed with what it actually receives.

Supabase — database, file storage, sign-in — Sydney, Australia

Everything in section 1 that is not listed under another provider is stored here, in Supabase's Sydney region. Your data is stored in Australia. Supabase is a US company and its staff may access systems for support and maintenance, which can involve access from overseas.

Stripe — payments, escrow and seller payouts

Stripe receives your email address and, when you pay, your card details entered directly into Stripe's own payment sheet on your phone. We never handle them.

If you sell, Stripe collects your legal name, date of birth, address, identity documents and bank account through its own hosted onboarding pages. That information goes from you to Stripe. It does not pass through us and we never see it. We only receive back whether your account is verified and able to receive payouts.

Stripe operates globally and processes and stores information outside Australia, including in the United States and Ireland. Stripe's own privacy policy governs what it does with it: https://stripe.com/au/privacy

Resend — the emails we send you — Tokyo, Japan

Sign-in emails are delivered through Resend, from send.themiddlechildmarket.com.au. Resend receives your email address and the contents of that email, which is a six-digit code that expires in ten minutes. Resend's servers for our account are in Tokyo, so your email address is disclosed overseas. We send no marketing email.

Expo — push notifications — United States

If notifications are on, Expo receives your push token and the notification text, and passes it to Apple's push service for delivery. See the warning about notification content in section 1.

Google — Sign in with Google

If you choose Continue with Google, Google authenticates you and tells us your name, your email address and an identifier for your Google account. Your Google password never reaches us. Google's own sign-in component runs inside the app for that moment, and what Google collects while it does — including your IP address, which it uses for security and fraud prevention — is governed by Google's privacy policy: https://policies.google.com/privacy

Google operates globally and processes and stores information outside Australia, including in the United States.

Apple

If you use Sign in with Apple, Apple authenticates you and tells us your name and an email address. Apple's push notification service delivers notifications to your device.

When you let the app detect your suburb, your device sends your coordinates to Apple to turn them into a place name. That happens through iOS's own location services and is governed by Apple's privacy policy: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/

This website

These pages are static and hosted by Netlify. There are no cookies, no analytics and no trackers on this site. Netlify records standard server request logs, which include IP addresses, for security and reliability.

Overseas disclosure

By using TMC you agree that we may disclose personal information to the providers above in the countries named. We take reasonable steps to use providers with appropriate protections, but by consenting you accept that Australian Privacy Principle 8.1 will not apply to those disclosures — meaning we are not accountable under the Privacy Act for what an overseas provider does with the information once we have disclosed it to them.

4. What other people can see about you

These are visible to anyone using the app, including people who are not signed in:

• Your display name and profile photo
• Your suburb, state and postcode
• Your rating, and the number of ratings behind it, once any of them have been revealed
• Your live listings, including their photos and the item's suburb

Visible to signed-in members but not to guests: the days and times you have said you are free for a pickup, if you set any.

These are not visible to anyone: your email address, your exact location, your payment details, your order history, your saved searches, the ratings you have given, and the messages you send (other than to the person you sent them to).

Your postcode is the most specific location detail that is publicly visible. If you live somewhere with a small postcode, bear that in mind.

5. Deleting your account

You can delete your account from inside the app: Profile → Settings → Delete account. The screen shows you a summary of your own account before you confirm. Deletion is immediate and cannot be undone. There is no grace period and no reactivation.

What happens depends on whether anyone else has a record of you.

If you have never bought, sold, or had a conversation

Your account is erased. Your sign-in, your profile, your listings, your photos, your saved items, your saved searches and your notification settings are all deleted outright.

The one thing that survives is a record that a deletion happened — the internal ID of the deleted account, whether it was an erasure or an anonymisation, a count of what was removed, and the date. We keep it so we can show a deletion request was honoured. It contains no name, email, or content.

If you have bought, sold, or had a conversation with someone

Your account is anonymised. Specifically:

Deleted:

• Your display name, profile photo, bio, suburb, state and postcode
• Your email address, from both our database and our sign-in system
• Your drafts, and any listing that never sold and nobody ever messaged you about, together with its photos
• The photographs from every listing of yours that was never part of an order — including a listing somebody did message you about. That listing stays visible in their message thread, but with the images gone
• Your saved listings, and your saved searches — including any coordinates one of them had frozen into it
• The pickup times you had set for buyers
• Your queued notifications, and your saved cards at Stripe

Your sign-in is destroyed. You cannot sign back in. Your Apple ID and email address are released, so you could start a completely new, unconnected account later if you wanted to.

Kept, and why:

• Your completed, refunded and cancelled orders, in full — what was bought, the fee breakdown, and when. Australian tax law requires five years of transaction records.
• The Stripe identifiers attached to those orders. A card chargeback can arrive months after a sale, and it is debited from us. Without the link from an order back to a payment we cannot answer it.
• Your message threads. They stay readable for the person you were talking to, with your name shown as "Deleted account". Deleting them would delete their side of a conversation about a real transaction, and that is not ours to take away. Your messages stay in those threads.
• Listings that were attached to an order stay, taken off the market, with their photos — because the other person's receipt shows them.
• The ratings you gave and received, with your name shown as "Deleted account". The ratings you gave stay in the other person's average, because they are a record of what you thought at the time. Your own rating and its count are cleared from your profile, and nothing can put them back.
• Anything to do with an issue raised on one of your orders — the reason, what you both wrote, the photographs and our decision. It is part of the record of a transaction, in the same way the order is.
• Reports you filed, and reports filed about you.

What we cannot delete for you: if you sold anything, Stripe holds the identity documents and payout records it collected during seller verification. Stripe keeps those under its own retention rules and we have no ability to delete them on your behalf. We detach your saved cards, and we stop the payout account being used through TMC — but the account itself remains at Stripe, and is unaffected there. To ask Stripe to delete what it holds, you have to contact Stripe.

When we cannot process a deletion yet

If you have anything still in progress, the app refuses and tells you what is blocking it. That is any order where money is authorised, held or on its way — there is someone on the other end of each one. Finish or cancel them and try again. If you are mid-checkout it is a softer block that clears by itself within ten minutes.

An offer you have made and nobody has answered does not block a deletion. It is withdrawn as part of it, so the other person sees it lapse rather than being left waiting on somebody who has gone.

6. How long we keep things

• Orders and their payment records: at least five years, as tax law requires.
• Messages and conversations: kept while either person still has an account, and after that for the benefit of whoever is left.
• Listings: kept while your account exists. Sold listings are kept as part of the order record.
• Ratings, and anything filed on an issue — the statements, the photographs and our decision: kept with the order they belong to, and therefore for the same five years.
• Saved searches, and your pickup times: kept until you delete them, or until you delete your account — they go on either deletion path.
• Sign-in codes: expire after ten minutes.
• Photo links: expire after one hour; the photos themselves are kept with the listing.
• Push tokens: deleted outright if your account is erased. If your account is anonymised instead, the token is kept but permanently disabled, so it cannot be reused for whoever next signs in on that handset.

We do not currently delete inactive accounts automatically. If you want your data gone, delete your account.

7. Security

Access to data is enforced at the database level: every table has rules that decide row by row who may read it, rather than relying on the app to ask nicely. Listing photos and the photographs filed on an issue are in private stores, each with its own rules, and are only ever served through links that expire. Your sign-in session is held in the iOS keychain. Everything in transit is encrypted.

No system is perfectly secure. If a data breach occurs that is likely to cause you serious harm, we will notify you and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner as the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme requires.

8. Getting at your information, and correcting it

Most of what we hold is visible in the app, and you can edit your profile and your listings there directly.

For anything else — a copy of what we hold, a correction, or a question about this policy — email milarkventures@gmail.com. We will respond within a reasonable time, normally 30 days. We may need to verify who you are first, and we may not be able to delete records we are required to keep (see section 5).

9. Children

TMC is for adults. You must be at least 18 to have an account. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18, and if we become aware that we have, we will delete it.

Listings are about children's goods, not about children. Please do not put a child's name, photograph or details in a listing or a public profile.

10. Changes to this policy

If we change this policy we will update the date at the top and publish the new version here. Where a change is significant we will tell you in the app.

11. Complaints

If you think we have mishandled your personal information, email milarkventures@gmail.com and say so plainly. We will look into it and reply in writing, normally within 30 days.

If you are not satisfied with our response, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner:

• oaic.gov.au
• 1300 363 992