Why we don’t send your customers’ keystrokes to Google

11 July 2026 · 4 min read

Every popular address autocomplete works the same way: as your customer types, each partial address is sent to the provider’s servers for matching. With the biggest providers, those servers are overseas — which means your customers’ home addresses are processed offshore, character by character.

For many Australian teams, that’s not allowed

Government, health, legal and financial organisations often operate under data-residency and privacy obligations that make “it goes to a US server” a hard no. The address field is an easy place to accidentally break those rules.

The WattleAddr approach

• Every request is served from Australian infrastructure (Binary Lane, Sydney) with a cross-state backup in Melbourne.
• No US CDN or offshore edge sits in the request path.
• You choose how long search logs live — or store queries hashed so raw addresses aren’t retained.

Sovereignty is a feature, not a footnote

We built WattleAddr because “fast address autocomplete” and “keeps data in Australia” shouldn’t be mutually exclusive. If your customers’ data is meant to stay onshore, the address field should respect that too.