How WA in Focus collects, stores and protects the material you send us: story tips, uploaded documents, email addresses and the counts we keep of what people read.
Last updated 3 October 2026
When you send a tip you give us three things: your name, an email address if you choose to leave one, and the story itself. Your name is required so a reporter can judge whether a tip is worth chasing. The email is optional and is used only to reply to you.
On an investigation page, the topic name is added to what you send so the right reporter sees it. The form asks for nothing else.
You can attach up to five files, 20MB each, by dragging them onto the form or clicking to choose them. The moment you send, the files move to a private store on the site's own backend, filed under a random reference rather than your name.
Only the editor account can open that store. It is not searchable, it is not listed anywhere on the site, and a visitor cannot reach a file by guessing an address.
A copy of your tip is emailed to the newsroom inbox. Files are not attached to that email. Instead the email carries a download link for each document, and each link stops working after seven days, so if you send something you want to keep, save your own copy.
Every submission comes back with a reference code of ten characters. It is the only way to read a reply on the site without leaving an email address, so keep it somewhere safe. Anyone who knows the code can read the replies attached to that tip.
If you lose the code, tell us the name and email you used and we can find your tip another way.
Used to reply and nothing else. We do not add you to a mailing list without asking, we do not pass it to anyone else, and we do not sell it.
If you subscribe for story updates we hold your email address and the date you signed up. Nothing else. Only the editor account can see the list, and one reply to the newsroom takes you off it.
The site keeps a count of which stories are opened and which share buttons are used, so the reporters know what matters locally. Those counts are numbers attached to a story. They carry no name, no email address and no device profile, and we record one view per visit.
There are no advertising networks or third party trackers on this site following you around the web.
The editor account, and nobody else. The company that hosts this site and its email service processes data on our behalf to keep the platform running, under their own terms.
If a court, a regulator or the police asks us for material, we handle that the way any newsroom would, and we tell you first where we are allowed to.
There is no automatic purge. A tip and its documents stay with us while a story is being checked and while any follow up is still open, and we review the pile from time to time.
If you ask us to remove your material, we remove it from the site and from the store. If a story has already been published, the article itself stays up because it is a matter of public record, but your tip and your documents come down.
The site runs over an encrypted connection. The editor area sits behind a password, and the database and the file store each carry strict access rules that decide who can read what. A visitor who is not signed in can only send information, never read it back.
No system is perfect. If something goes wrong in a way that puts your material at risk, we will tell you what happened and what we are doing about it.
Email the newsroom and ask to see what we hold about you, ask us to correct something, or ask us to delete it. Leaving the email list works the same way. There is no form to fill in and no fee.
If our practice changes, this page changes with it and the date at the top moves.
Any question about your information, or a story you would rather we did not run, goes to the same place: wainfocus.team@gmail.com.
