Privacy policy

Effective 26 July 2026.

BinsOut helps you find your council's bin collection schedule and reminds you which bins to put out. We built it to collect as little about you as possible. There are no accounts, and we do not build a profile of who you are. The app is free and shows ads to keep it that way, which is described in Advertising below.

Location

With your permission, the app reads your device location while you are using it to work out which council you are in and which property your schedule applies to. Your coordinates are sent to our server only to look up that schedule, and are used transiently and then discarded. We do not store your location or link it to you. We never access your location in the background.

What is stored on your device

Your last schedule, your reminder preferences, and which councils you have asked us to add are stored only on your device so the app works offline and remembers your choices. Reminders are scheduled locally on your device. We do not send you push notifications.

What we store on our servers

• Schedules are cached by property address (not by you) to speed up the app and reduce load on council systems.
• When you tap "notify me when my council is added", we record the council or area, not you. There is no name, email, account, or device identifier attached.

Advertising

BinsOut is free and shows ads supplied by Google AdMob. To select and measure those ads, Google's advertising SDK collects and processes certain device information, which may include a device advertising identifier, IP address, coarse location, and how you interact with ads, in line with Google's own policies. Google acts as an independent controller of that data. We do not receive, store, or sell that data ourselves, and because there are no accounts, it is not linked to any identity we hold. What we do collect about ads is what you send us by tapping Report ad, and which ads our own block list has hidden.

You stay in control. On Android you can reset or delete your advertising ID and turn off ad personalisation under Settings › Google › Ads. On iOS the app does not track you across other apps or websites and serves non-personalised ads only, so there is no tracking prompt. To understand how Google uses this data, see how Google uses information from sites or apps that use its services.

Reporting an ad

Every ad in BinsOut has a Report ad button. No report is sent unless you tap it and choose a reason. When you do, we read everything we can about the advertiser, and nothing about you. That is the whole design: the report describes the ad, not the person who saw it.

What a report contains:

• The ad itself: its headline, text, button, advertiser and network names, image addresses, Google's own id for that ad, and a picture of the ad card as it appeared on your screen.
• The reason you picked, from a fixed list. There is deliberately no free-text box, so a report cannot contain anything you type.
• Basic technical context: your device model, operating system version, language, timezone, connection type and the app version. This tells us who a bad ad was aimed at. It does not identify you, and it is not linked to anything else.

What a report does not contain: no name, email or account, no advertising identifier, no device identifier, no location, and no free text. Reports go to a service we run at ads.sbc.softwareand are read by us for one purpose, to get bad ads blocked in Google's Ad Review Center. They are not sold or shared for advertising. As with any request over the internet, your device's IP address is visible to our server and may appear in ordinary web server logs; it is not stored as part of the report.

Blocking bad ads

Once we have reviewed a report and judged an ad to be bad, we add it to a block list. The app fetches that list when it starts and hides those ads before you see them, on every device, not just the one that reported it. Fetching the list sends nothing about you: it is a plain request for a short file of identifiers.

When the app does hide an ad, it tells us which entry on the list matched, so we can see whether the list is working and catch an entry that is hiding too much. Those messages carry the same thing a report carries: the ad and basic technical context. No name, no account, no advertising or device identifier, no location, no free text. They are about our own block list, not about you.

What we do not do

No accounts. We do not sell your personal data, and we do not run our own analytics trackers. Aside from Google AdMob (described above), we do not embed third party SDKs that identify you. If our data practices change, we will update this policy and the app's store privacy labels first.

Data sources

Council boundaries and addresses are derived from Geoscape Administrative Boundaries and G-NAF (© Geoscape Australia, CC BY 4.0), and councils' own open data. We are not affiliated with any council. Schedules may be inaccurate, so always confirm with your council.

Children

The app is a general audience utility and is not directed at children.

Your rights

Because we hold no information that identifies you, there is nothing personal to access or delete on our side. Clearing the app's data, or uninstalling, removes everything stored on your device. You can revoke location and notification permissions at any time in your device settings.

Changes

We will post any changes here and update the effective date above.

Contact

Questions: contact@sbc.software