Privacy

Simmer is software Australian hospitality venues use to run their business. If you booked a table, joined a venue's loyalty program, or ordered from your phone, the venue is who you gave your details to. Simmer holds them on that venue's behalf.

What we hold about guests

• Your name, phone number and email address, when you give them to book, order or join a loyalty program.
• Your bookings and orders at that venue, including which seat food was ordered to.
• Anything you type into a notes field — please only put in what you want the venue to see.
• Dietary requirements and allergies, but only if you chose to give them and agreed to them being recorded.

Allergies and dietary information

Under the Privacy Act 1988 health information is sensitive, and we treat it that way. It is recorded only with your explicit agreement, shown to venue staff so they can serve you safely, and never used to decide who gets marketing. If you withdraw that agreement the venue stops seeing it.

Where Simmer warns staff that a dish clashes with your requirements, that warning is built from what the venue recorded about its own recipes. It is a prompt for a person to check, not a guarantee, and the software says so wherever it appears.

Marketing

A venue can only email you an offer if you opted in. Every message says why you are receiving it. Ask the venue to stop and they can, from their own screen, immediately.

Where it lives

In Microsoft Azure's Australia East region, in Sydney. Backups stay in the same region. Simmer does not sell data, and does not share it between venues: one venue cannot see another's guests, which is enforced by the database itself rather than by application code remembering to check.

We use Microsoft Azure for hosting, storage, email delivery, and the document and menu reading features. They process data for us; they do not get to use it for anything else.

How long

For as long as the venue keeps using Simmer, since a booking history is what tells them you are a regular. If a venue leaves, their data is exported to them and removed. Database backups are kept for seven days and then age out.

Seeing or correcting your details

Ask the venue — they can see, change and delete what they hold about you, and they can export it. If they need our help to do it, we help them. If you would rather come to us directly, write to privacy@simmer.au.

If you are not happy with how a complaint is handled you can take it to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.

Staff

If you work at a venue using Simmer, it holds your roster, hours, qualifications and their expiry dates. Clock-in photos are a setting your venue chooses, and you can opt out of them individually from the tablet without asking anyone.