Privacy

Effective: 8 August 2026

About this policy

NameChecker is a personal project that checks whether a business or product name appears on Australian public registers and whether matching domains are registered. This page explains what happens to what you type.

NameChecker is not currently required to comply with the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth), because it falls under the small business threshold in section 6D of that Act. Information is nonetheless handled in line with the Australian Privacy Principles as a matter of practice.

There are no accounts

There is no sign-up, no login, and no form other than the search box. NameChecker does not ask for your name, email address or any other contact details, and holds no database of users.

What is collected

• The name you search. Typed into the search box and sent to the registers below in order to answer your question.
• Your IP address. Used to apply a per-visitor rate limit, so that one person cannot exhaust the quota the registers grant this site. Google Analytics and the web host also receive it — see below.
• Standard analytics data collected by Google Analytics — see below.

Where your search goes

The name you type is sent to these services, because there is no way to check availability without asking them:

• RDAP, via rdap.org, which forwards the query to the registry operator responsible for that domain ending — for domain availability. rdap.org is served through Cloudflare's global network, so the query passes through it on the way.
• ABN Lookup, operated by the Australian Business Register — for business and entity names.
• IP Australia, via the Australian Trade Mark Search API — for trade marks.

Each of those organisations handles what it receives under its own terms.

Analytics

This site uses Google Analytics to count visits and to see whether searches are returning useful answers. Google sets cookies and receives your IP address and your activity on this site, under Google's own privacy terms.

The text you search is never sent to Google.

The analytics events record only how many characters you typed, which register was queried, and whether it answered successfully. The name itself is deliberately excluded. Blocking cookies or using an ad blocker prevents analytics from loading, and the site works normally without it.

Information sent overseas

Some of what is described above leaves Australia:

• Google Analytics — United States and other countries in which Google operates.
• Cloudflare, which fronts rdap.org — a United States company operating a global network, so a domain query may be handled outside Australia.
• Domain registry operators — these vary by domain ending. A .com.au query stays with the Australian registry; a .com query goes to a registry operated from the United States.

ABN Lookup and IP Australia are Australian government services, and .au domain queries are answered by the Australian .au registry service.

NameChecker runs on Fly.io, on a server in Sydney. Fly.io is a United States company, so although the machine and its logs sit in Australia, its staff and systems can reach them from overseas.

How long anything is kept

• Search results are held in memory for up to 24 hours so repeated searches do not re-query the registers. This cache is never written to disk and is discarded whenever the application restarts.
• Application logs record what was searched, which register answered and how long it took, so that faults can be diagnosed. They do not record your IP address. These logs are held by the hosting provider, Fly.io, and age out of its retention window.
• Your IP address is used by NameChecker only in memory, for the length of the rate-limiting window, and is never written to its logs or storage. Fly.io separately keeps its own network-level records of connections to the site, as any web host does.

If the name you are checking is commercially sensitive and not yet public, take that into account before searching — here or on any similar tool.

Accessing or correcting your information

Because there are no accounts, there is no personal record held about you to retrieve or correct. Search terms in the logs are not linked to any identified person and cannot be looked up by individual.

What this site does not do

• It does not sell or share your information with advertisers.
• It does not build a profile of you or track you across other sites.
• It does not keep any record that links a search back to you.
• It does not make any automated decision about you.

Complaints

NameChecker is a personal project and does not operate a staffed contact channel. If you have a privacy concern, you can contact the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner at oaic.gov.au or on 1300 363 992.

Changes to this policy

Any change is published on this page, and the effective date at the top is the version marker. There is no mailing list to notify.