Terms of use

1. What this site is

LocalsKnow is an independent directory of businesses and places in New South Wales and Victoria, operated by Automatrix Digital. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting for NSW Fair Trading, the Victorian Building Authority, the Australian Business Register, ASIC, any council, or any tourism body, and nothing on it should be read as speaking for any of them.

2. Listings are information, not advice

A listing records that a business exists and repeats details that business publishes about itself. It is not a recommendation and not professional advice. We have not engaged these businesses, inspected their work, or assessed their suitability for your job. Deciding who to hire is yours to do.

Details go stale. Businesses change hours, numbers, addresses and owners without telling anybody. Every listing shows the date its details were last read from a source, and that date is the extent of what we are saying about currency.

3. What verification means

Where a listing shows a verified badge, it means one thing: on the date shown, the licence number recorded against that listing returned as current for the stated class of work in the relevant state register.

It specifically does not mean:

• that the licence is current now
• that the business is insured
• that the business is competent, or that we think it is
• that the licence covers every kind of work the business advertises
• that we accept any responsibility for work performed by that business

A licence number shown without a verified badge was read from the business’s own published material and has not been checked. Check it yourself before you commit money. The licence check tool takes you straight to the official register.

4. Ratings and reviews

Where a star rating appears, it was read from the Google Places API on the date shown beside it and is Google’s number, not ours. Where no rating appears, we do not have one, and the page links to the business’s Google profile instead of showing a figure we cannot source. We do not write, buy, generate or edit reviews.

5. If you claim a listing

By claiming a listing you confirm that:

• you own the business or are authorised to act for it
• the information you publish is accurate and not misleading
• any licence or registration number you supply is genuinely held by that business
• you will keep the listing current, or release the claim

Claiming and maintaining a listing is free. We may suspend a listing or revoke a claim where information is false, where a licence number is not held, or where the listing is used to mislead. Publishing a licence number you do not hold is also a matter for the relevant state regulator.

6. Images and files you send us

You can attach a logo and photographs when you claim a listing, and photographs as evidence when you report a correction. Sending one is optional and nothing on this site depends on it.

By attaching an image you confirm that:

• you own the copyright in it, or you have the owner's permission to give it to us for this purpose. This is the one people get wrong. A photographer usually keeps copyright in photographs you commissioned unless your agreement transferred it, and paying an invoice is not by itself a transfer.
• it does not show a person who can be identified unless that person has agreed to it appearing on your listing.
• it is not someone else's logo, artwork or stock image.

You keep ownership. You give us permission to store the image, resize it, and publish it on your listing and anywhere that listing appears on this site, such as a town or category page. That permission is not exclusive, we do not sell or sub-licence it, and it ends when you ask us to remove the image.

Ask and we will take an image down. No reason needed, no argument, same as removing a listing. We may also decline to publish or later remove any image at our own discretion, including one that appears not to be yours.

Photographs sent as evidence with a correction are used to check the change and are not published.

7. Removal

A business can have its listing removed at any time, at no cost, without giving a reason, by contacting us from an address connected to the business. We will action it within five business days. This is not conditional on anything.

8. What is not permitted

• Automated harvesting, scraping or bulk extraction of the listings.
• Republishing the compiled directory, or a substantial part of it, as your own.
• Using contact details from this site to send unsolicited commercial messages. That is also a Spam Act problem, not just a terms problem.
• Attempting to manipulate ordering, or submitting listings for businesses that do not exist.
• Using the site in a way that interferes with it working for anyone else.

Legitimate crawling is welcome. The sitemap index is at /sitemap.xml, the machine readable summary is at /llms.txt, and the crawl rules are in robots.txt.

9. Intellectual property

Facts about a business belong to that business and we claim nothing over them. The compiled directory, the taxonomy, the service area modelling, the generated statistics, the editorial content and the design of this site are ours. Business names, logos and trade marks belong to their owners and appear here to identify the business.

10. Third party links

Outbound links go to sites we do not control. We are not responsible for their content, their accuracy or their privacy practices. A link is not an endorsement, including where it is a dofollow link.

11. Liability

The site is provided as is. To the extent permitted by law we exclude all warranties and are not liable for loss arising from reliance on information here, from dealings with a business found here, or from the site being unavailable.

Nothing in these terms excludes, restricts or modifies any consumer guarantee or right under the Australian Consumer Law that cannot lawfully be excluded. Where our liability can be limited but not excluded, it is limited to resupplying the service.

12. Changes

These terms can change. The effective date at the top is the date of the last build that changed them. Continuing to use the site after a change means accepting it.

13. Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of New South Wales, and the courts of New South Wales have jurisdiction. That is a fitting amount of irony for a site built around ignoring the state line.

14. Contact

hello@localsknow.com.au, or the contact page.