Why We Insisted Your Evacuation Data Stays in Australia
By Dr. Rashid Khan, Founder of EvacTracker
In the early stages of developing EvacTracker, I had a conversation with an advisor who suggested we could cut costs meaningfully by hosting our infrastructure offshore. On paper, it made sense. In practice, I said no, and I’ve never once reconsidered that decision.
I want to explain why, because I think it says something about what a system like this is actually responsible for.
This Isn’t Ordinary Customer Data
EvacTracker holds information about who lives in a building, who was present during an emergency, who checked in and when, and who may have needed assistance. That’s a different category of information to a shopping cart or a newsletter subscription. It’s tied directly to people’s safety and, in the worst circumstances, to their whereabouts during the most vulnerable moments of their lives.
Data like that deserves to be treated with more seriousness than the industry default, not less. And in my view, the seriousness starts with knowing exactly where it lives, under whose laws, and under whose oversight.
“If a system is built to protect people during an emergency, the way it handles their data shouldn’t be an afterthought bolted on for compliance.”
Why Australian Data Centres, Specifically
By keeping all customer data in Australian data centres, using trusted cloud infrastructure and industry-standard security measures, we’re able to give organisations a straightforward answer to a question they’re increasingly right to ask: is our information subject to Australian privacy and data governance expectations, or someone else’s?
For a building manager, a strata committee, or a compliance officer, that matters. It means not having to untangle a foreign jurisdiction’s data laws to understand what happens to your residents’ information. It means one clear line of accountability, not a chain that crosses borders and gets murkier at every link.
We Collect Less, On Purpose
The other decision I’d highlight, because it gets less attention than data residency but matters just as much, is restraint. EvacTracker only collects the information genuinely needed to support emergency management. Not because more data isn’t tempting to hold onto, but because every additional piece of information you store is another piece you’re responsible for protecting.
Security measures matter, and we invest in them. But the most secure piece of data is often the one you never collected in the first place.
What This Means Practically
None of this is a guarantee that we’re the only option that takes data seriously, and I’d encourage any building manager evaluating any emergency technology, ours included, to ask directly: where does this data live, who can access it, and what happens to it after an incident is over.
For us, the answer is simple enough to say in a sentence: your data stays in Australia, we collect only what we need, and we protect it as if the people it describes are the same people relying on us to get them home safely. Because they are.