Why your customers’ keystrokes should never leave the country

11 July 2026 · updated 20 Oct 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 foreign 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 backups held in Australia.
• No foreign CDN or offshore edge sits in the request path. On 13 October 2026 a DNS change sent some requests through Cloudflare. The API was moved back within about an hour, and every record was DNS only by 14 October; see the Data Residency Attestation.
• You choose how long search logs live, and query text is automatically deleted once that window passes.

Data residency as a feature

We built WattleAddr so an address form can have fast autocomplete and keep data in Australia. If your customers’ data is meant to stay onshore, the address field should keep it onshore too.

What we say here in prose, we also state formally for procurement in the data residency attestation, dated and re-issued whenever a fact changes.