Legal
Compliance and Copyright
How FOI Monitor operates within Australian copyright, privacy, and freedom of information law.
Legal basis and operating framework
FOI Monitor is a non-commercial, public-interest tool. It indexes FOI disclosure logs published by 28 Australian Government departments and agencies, downloads released documents, extracts text, and generates AI summaries to support research and triage. All source URLs and document links are preserved so content can be verified against originals.
Statutory authority
Section 11C of the Freedom of Information Act 1982 (Cth) requires agencies to publish documents released under FOI on their websites within 10 days of release. FOI disclosure logs are statutory public records. FOI Monitor indexes these already-public records and does not request or obtain documents through any other channel.
Copyright
All content sourced from government disclosure logs remains the copyright of the originating department or agency. FOI Monitor does not claim ownership of government-sourced content.
The majority of tracked departments publish under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0), consistent with the AusGOAL framework and the OAIC Principles on Open Public Sector Information. Where departments use more restrictive terms, FOI Monitor relies on fair dealing provisions under the Copyright Act 1968 (ss 40, 42) for the purposes of research, study, and reporting on matters of public interest.
AI-generated summaries, metadata enrichment, and the FOI Monitor interface itself are original work. Summaries are clearly labelled as AI-generated triage aids and are not presented as substitutes for the source documents. FOI Monitor's source code is available at https://github.com/emil7051/FOI_Tool.
Privacy
Personal information appearing in FOI releases has been assessed and published by the releasing agency in accordance with its obligations under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles. FOI Monitor does not collect personal information beyond what is already publicly available on department websites. This service does not require user accounts, does not use tracking cookies, and does not collect visitor personal information.
Automated access
FOI Monitor respects robots.txt directives and crawl-delay instructions.
All requests are rate-limited with per-domain pacing. Where a department blocks access to
specific file types or paths, those restrictions are honoured. Where a department specifies
a crawl delay (e.g. Services Australia at 10 seconds), that delay is enforced.
Contact
Departments or individuals with concerns about how FOI Monitor uses their content, or who wish to request content removal, should contact foi-monitor@users.noreply.github.com.