Data Privacy Statement

Career Adviser is built and operated by Cognify Labs, a Sydney-based software and AI studio, at careers.advicegenie.com.au. Cognify Labs is the entity responsible for the personal information handled through this platform, and handles it in line with the Australian Privacy Principles under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth). Questions or requests: hello@cognifylabs.ai.

The published career catalogue is free and needs no sign-up. Browsing and reading careers does not create an account and does not ask for anything about you. Like most sites we do collect anonymous usage analytics on every visit — described in full under “Analytics” below, and switched off if your browser sends a Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal. An account is only needed to request a new career, vote on a pending request, or generate a personalised plan.

We practise data minimisation — we collect the least that lets a feature work.

• Account details — your email address and name, captured when you register, through Amazon Cognito.
• Your password — created and verified entirely within Amazon Cognito. We never see it, never receive it and never store it (see “How your sign-in is protected” below).
• Activity on your account — the careers you request or vote for, and the generation runs you start, with timestamps. This is what lets an administrator approve requests and keeps an audit trail behind every administrative action.
• Personalisation inputs — if you generate a personalised plan, the circumstances you enter into that form: your state or territory, your year level, whether you can relocate to study, and the cost figures you choose to adjust. You type these in; we do not derive or infer them.
• Contact messages — if you use the contact form, the name, email address, organisation (if you give one), enquiry type and message you submit, so we can reply. They are delivered to our inbox by email and not added to any mailing list.
• Usage analytics — on every visit, whether or not you have an account, unless your browser sends a Do Not Track / GPC signal: which pages you view, where you arrived from, your approximate location (country, from your IP address), coarse device and browser details, and — through Microsoft Clarity — an anonymised recording of on-page interactions such as clicks and scrolling. Meta Pixel additionally reports page views to Facebook/Instagram for ad measurement. Set out in full under “Analytics” below.
• Technical request logs — standard server logs (IP address, timestamp, browser user-agent, the path requested) are written to Amazon CloudWatch in Sydney and used only to operate, secure and debug the service. They are not used to build a profile of you and are kept for a limited period.

A personalised plan is private to your account. It is never published, and never shown to anyone else.

• We do not run any tracker beyond the three analytics/advertising tools disclosed under “Analytics” below (a first-party beacon, Microsoft Clarity, and Meta Pixel) — nothing else on this site sets a tracking cookie or reports your activity to a third party.
• We do not sell, rent or trade your data, and we do not share it with data brokers.
• No payment information — the site takes no payments. If that changes, this statement will be updated first.
• No sensitive information as defined by the Privacy Act, and no precise or device-level location — only the country your IP address resolves to, and the state or territory you choose to enter.

We use three analytics/advertising tools to understand how people find and move through the site, and to measure how well our own ad campaigns work. The first two are not used for advertising; the third, Meta Pixel, is. All three are disabled automatically when your browser sends a Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal, and a browser content blocker or disabling JavaScript stops any of them.

1. First-party analytics (our own). A small script on each page sends an event to our own API when a page loads and when you leave it. Each event records:

• the page URL and title, and the page or site you came from;
• a random visitor identifier and a random session identifier (stored in the agid and agsid cookies — see “Cookies and browser storage”), which let us tell a returning visit from a new one without knowing who you are;
• coarse device and browser context: language, timezone, screen and window size, device pixel ratio, colour depth, platform, rough CPU/memory class, and connection type;
• time spent on the page and how far down it you scrolled;
• your IP address and the browser user-agent (added by our server from the request), and the country that IP resolves to.

These events are stored in an Amazon DynamoDB table in the AWS Sydney Region and are deleted automatically after 13 months. To turn the IP address into a country name we send it to ip-api.com, a geolocation service that operates outside Australia; only the IP address is sent, only the country code comes back, and the IP is not retained by us for any purpose other than this lookup and the security logging described above.

2. Microsoft Clarity (third-party). We use Microsoft Clarity, a product-analytics service from Microsoft. Clarity records an anonymised playback of how visitors interact with a page — mouse movement, clicks, scrolling, and rage/dead clicks — and aggregates these into heatmaps. Clarity masks text content by default, so what you type and the text you read are not captured; keystrokes in form fields are not recorded.

• Clarity sets its own cookies (_clck, _clsk, and Microsoft cookies such as MUID) — see “Cookies and browser storage”.
• The data Clarity collects is processed by Microsoft on its own infrastructure outside Australia (primarily the United States). It is handled under Microsoft’s terms and privacy statement, and Microsoft may use it to provide and improve the Clarity service. It is not sold, and we do not use it for advertising.
• If that matters to you, use the Do Not Track / GPC setting or a content blocker — both stop Clarity loading at all.

3. Meta Pixel (third-party, advertising). We use Meta Pixel, a conversion-tracking tool from Meta (Facebook). Unlike the two tools above, Meta Pixel is an advertising tracker: it tells us whether people who saw or clicked one of our Facebook/Instagram ads went on to visit the site, so we can measure and improve those campaigns, and it may let Meta include your visit in the audiences it builds for ad targeting on its own platforms.

• On every page load (unless disabled as described below), Meta Pixel sends the page URL and a PageView event to Meta. It does not receive your name, email or anything you type into the site.
• It sets its own cookie, _fbp — see “Cookies and browser storage”. If you are logged into Facebook or Instagram in the same browser, Meta may be able to associate that visit with your Meta account under Meta’s own data policy; we do not receive or see that association.
• The data Meta Pixel collects is processed by Meta on its own infrastructure outside Australia and is handled under Meta’s own data policy. This is the one analytics tool here that is used for advertising purposes.
• Use the Do Not Track / GPC setting or a content blocker to stop Meta Pixel loading at all, or manage ad personalisation directly in your Facebook/Instagram account settings.

Every career document is compiled from publicly available Australian sources — government labour-market and occupation information, the Commonwealth CRICOS register of accredited courses and providers, state and territory admissions centres, and public institutional and web pages retrieved through a web-search API.

Research queries sent to that search API are about the career being researched — job titles, entry requirements, course names. They never contain your account details, your identity, or anything you entered into a personalisation form. Each claim in a document is labelled as a verified fact, an estimate, an opinion or a forecast, and every fact carries its source.

Authentication is handled by Amazon Cognito, a managed AWS identity service. Several protections are in force:

• Your password is never transmitted to us. Sign-in uses the Secure Remote Password (SRP) protocol, which proves you know your password without ever sending it over the network. Cognito stores only a cryptographic verifier, not the password — and we, as operators, cannot read or export it.
• Threat protection is set to ENFORCED. Cognito checks every sign-in for risk signals, automatically blocks the use of credentials known to have been exposed in third-party breaches, and can challenge or block sign-ins that look compromised.
• Password rules — a minimum of 8 characters with upper case, lower case and a digit required.
• No account enumeration — sign-in and password-reset responses are deliberately identical whether or not an email is registered, so the forms cannot be used to discover who has an account.
• Privilege-escalation guard — the account-role attribute is not writable by the user, so no one can grant themselves administrative access at sign-up or afterwards. The authoritative role is additionally held server-side.
• Short-lived sessions — access tokens last one hour; the refresh token lasts 30 days and signing out ends the session. Sign-in tokens are held in your browser’s local storage, not in a cookie, and are never sent to a third party.

You are still responsible for choosing a strong, unique password and keeping your login to yourself.

The platform runs in Amazon Web Services’ Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region (ap-southeast-2). Your account data and any personalised plan — your email, name, account activity and personalisation inputs — are stored and processed only there, and are not transferred outside Australia. Our first-party analytics data is also stored only in Sydney. Four narrow flows send limited data to providers that operate overseas; they are listed at the end of this section.

• Database — Amazon DynamoDB in Sydney, encrypted at rest by AWS, with point-in-time recovery enabled.
• Documents and files — Amazon S3 in Sydney, encrypted at rest (SSE-S3 / AES-256), in a bucket with all public access blocked.
• Application logic — AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway in Sydney, with per-route request throttling.
• AI processing — career documents and personalised plans are generated with AWS Bedrock using Australia-resident Claude models. Bedrock inference for this app is pinned to AWS’s Australian regions, so prompt and response content stays within Australia. Prompts are not used by AWS or the model provider to train models.

Data that leaves Australia, and only this:

• Career-research web search — sends only career research terms (job titles, entry requirements, course names), never personal or account data, to a web-search provider that may operate outside Australia.
• Microsoft Clarity — anonymised on-page interaction data (see “Analytics”) is processed by Microsoft outside Australia, primarily in the United States. Disabled by Do Not Track / GPC or a content blocker.
• Meta Pixel — page-view events (see “Analytics”) are sent to Meta (Facebook) outside Australia for ad measurement and may inform Meta’s own ad-targeting audiences. Disabled by Do Not Track / GPC or a content blocker.
• IP geolocation — a visitor’s IP address is sent to ip-api.com to obtain a country code, and nothing else. Not performed when analytics is disabled.

All traffic to and from the site is served over HTTPS. Plain HTTP requests are automatically redirected to HTTPS.

• The TLS certificate for careers.advicegenie.com.au is issued and managed by AWS Certificate Manager (ACM). ACM generates the private key inside AWS; it is never exposed to us and cannot be exported.
• ACM renews the certificate automatically before it expires, so there is no lapsed-certificate risk from a missed manual renewal.
• The minimum negotiated protocol is TLS 1.2 (CloudFront’s TLSv1.2_2021 security policy), using modern cipher suites and Server Name Indication.

Public pages and published career documents are delivered through Amazon CloudFront, AWS’s content delivery network. CloudFront serves only public, non-personal content — your account data and any personalised output do not pass through the CDN.

• HTTPS enforced at the edge, with the modern TLS policy above, and support for HTTP/2 and HTTP/3.
• Private origin — the S3 bucket behind CloudFront is not publicly reachable. CloudFront authenticates to it using Origin Access Control (signed SigV4 requests); direct access to the bucket is blocked.
• Network-layer protection — CloudFront includes AWS Shield Standard, which provides automatic protection against common network and transport-layer DDoS attacks at no additional cost, plus AWS’s edge network protections.
• Application throttling — the API enforces request rate and burst limits to absorb abusive traffic.
• CloudFront edge caches hold only already-public career content. Nothing that identifies a signed-in user is cached.

When analytics is active (see “Analytics” — not when Do Not Track / GPC is set), these cookies are used, including one advertising cookie set by Meta Pixel:

• agid — a random first-party visitor id, about 2 years, so a returning visit can be told from a new one.
• agsid — a random first-party session id, 30 minutes, grouping page views into one visit.
• _clck, _clsk and Microsoft cookies such as MUID / ANONCHK — set by Microsoft Clarity to keep a consistent (anonymous) session recording. Lifetimes range from the session to about a year and are set by Microsoft.
• _fbp — set by Meta Pixel, about 90 days, an advertising cookie used by Meta to link your visit to ad measurement and targeting on Meta’s own platforms. If you are signed into Facebook or Instagram in the same browser, Meta may also set or read its own cookies (such as fr) under Meta’s data policy, not ours.

None of these hold your name, email or any content you enter. Separately, your sign-in tokens and your light/dark theme preference are kept in your browser’s local storage on your own device — not cookies, and not sent anywhere.

You can switch off all three tools — the first-party beacon, Microsoft Clarity, and Meta Pixel:

• Do Not Track / Global Privacy Control — turn on either setting in your browser (or an extension that sends GPC). We check for both on every page load, and when either is present none of the three tools load at all. No cookie is set.
• A content blocker — any tracker/ad blocker, or disabling JavaScript, also prevents all three from loading.
• Meta’s own ad settings — you can separately manage ad personalisation for the ads Meta shows you in your Facebook/Instagram account settings, regardless of what this site does.
• Turning analytics off does not affect reading the catalogue, signing in, or generating a plan.

This does not change the security-related server logs (IP, user-agent, path) that every web server keeps; those are covered under “What we collect”.

We do not sell your data, and we do not share it with advertisers or data brokers. Your information is handled by a small number of service providers acting on our instructions:

• Amazon Web Services — hosting, database, storage, identity (Cognito) and AI (Bedrock), all in the Sydney region as described above.
• Amazon Cognito additionally sends your account-verification email.
• A web-search provider — receives career-research terms only, never anything about you.
• Microsoft — runs Microsoft Clarity and receives the anonymised session-interaction data it collects, processed outside Australia. Only when analytics is active.
• Meta (Facebook) — runs Meta Pixel and receives the page-view events it collects, for ad measurement and its own ad-targeting audiences, processed outside Australia. Only when analytics is active. This is the one recipient on this list that uses the data it receives for advertising.
• ip-api.com — receives a visitor’s IP address to return a country code, and nothing else. Only when analytics is active.

We may disclose information if required by Australian law, a court order, or a valid request from a regulator or law-enforcement agency, or where necessary to protect the rights, safety or security of users or the public.

• Account details and account activity are kept for as long as your account is open.
• Usage-quota records and abandoned request records expire automatically on a short schedule.
• A personalised plan is kept against your account until you ask us to delete it or close your account.
• Technical request logs are retained for a limited period, then discarded.
• First-party analytics events are deleted automatically 13 months after they are recorded.
• Microsoft Clarity data is retained by Microsoft under its own schedule (Clarity currently states a rolling period of about 13 months).
• The _fbp cookie expires after about 90 days; data Meta Pixel has already sent to Meta is retained by Meta under its own schedule.

When you close your account, we delete the personal data attached to it.

You can ask us to:

• tell you what personal data we hold about you and provide a copy;
• correct anything inaccurate;
• delete your account and the personal data attached to it.

There is not yet a self-service control for this in the app — email hello@cognifylabs.ai and we will action it directly. Building a self-service path is planned.

If you are not satisfied with how we have handled a privacy matter, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) at oaic.gov.au.

Our audience includes high-school students, some of whom are under 18. That is why the free catalogue needs no account: a student can read everything without ever giving us their name or email. The anonymous usage analytics described above still run — they record page views, coarse device details, through Microsoft Clarity masked on-page interactions, and through Meta Pixel a page-view event sent to Meta for ad measurement — but nothing that identifies a person — and a student (or their school) can switch all of it off entirely with the Do Not Track / GPC setting or a content blocker. Creating an account — to request a career, vote, or generate a personalised plan — collects the email address and name of whoever creates it, as set out above.

We will update this statement as the platform changes, and always before any paid feature goes live. The “last updated” date at the top will change and significant changes will be called out.

Questions about this statement or your data: hello@cognifylabs.ai, or via the contact page.