Your privacy is important to us. This privacy statement describes how we collect, use and protect your private and confidential information when we are managing our services and doing our policy and advocacy work.
The privacy statement complies with Commonwealth and Victorian privacy laws and requirements. These laws give you rights that apply when we collect, use, disclose and dispose of your personal information – that is, information that identifies or could identify you, such as your name, address or phone number. Because some people who use our website or receive our newsletter are from the US, UK and EU, we also follow the European Union General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) May 2018.
This privacy statement applies to all COTA Victoria and Seniors Rights Victoria users.
If you have questions or concerns about this privacy statement, contact us on (03) 9655 2100.
We collect personal information, with permission, directly – unless it is unreasonable or not practical.
We may collect personal information from you by:
We also may collect:
You do not have to give us personal information. However, if you don’t, we may not be able to:
We collect your personal information so that we can:
Sometimes we will share your personal information with other people or organisations, for specific reasons.
| PERSON OR ORGANISATION | REASON FOR SHARING |
| our employees, related parties, contractors or service providers |
|
| third parties (such as web hosting providers, IT systems administrators, mailing houses, couriers, payment processors, data entry service providers, electronic network administrators, debt collectors, and professional advisors) |
|
| suppliers and other third parties with whom we have commercial relationships |
|
| any other organisation |
|
| overseas organisations, including our e-newsletter service provider and other ICT service providers, who may store personal information in the United States of America or the European Economic Area |
Note: We take reasonable steps to make sure overseas organisations don’t breach privacy rules to do with personal information |
Within Australia, we may combine or share any information that we collect with information collected by any of our related parties.
We will keep your personal information secure by storing:
We will take reasonable steps to make sure your personal information is not misused; lost; or accessed, changed or shared without permission.
We will take reasonable steps to destroy or de-identify your personal information when we don’t need it any longer, or when we are no longer required by law to keep it, whichever comes later. However, if the information is part of a Commonwealth record, we won’t destroy or de-identify it.
Whenever you wish, you can contact us and ask to see any personal information we have about you.
If you think that personal information we have about you is wrong or missing something, you can ask us to correct it.
When you use our website, we may send a cookie – a small summary file with a unique ID number – to your computer or other device. Cookies allow us to:
Our cookies do not collect personal information. If you don’t want to receive cookies, you can set your browser so that your device does not accept them, but this may prevent us providing a service to you that you have or are requesting.
We may log IP addresses (that is, the addresses of devices connected to the internet) so that we can analyse trends, manage our websites, track users’ movements, and gather broad demographic and geographic information.
Our websites are linked to the internet, which is inherently insecure. This means we can’t promise that information sent to us online is secure and won’t be intercepted while being sent over the Internet. Any personal or other information or other information your send to us online is sent at your own risk.
Our websites may have links to other websites run by third parties. We make no representations or warranties about the privacy practices of any third party website, and we are not responsible for the information on any third party website or their privacy policies. Third party websites are responsible for telling you about their own privacy practices.
We may send you e-newsletters, marketing communications and information about our events and services that we think may interest you. We may send these in a range of ways, including by mail, SMS, fax or email. We follow laws including the Spam Act 2003 (Cwlth), which makes it illegal to send commercial messages to someone who didn’t agree to receive them.
If you tell us you have a preferred way of receiving marketing communications, we will try to use this method whenever it’s practical.
If you don’t want to receive our marketing communications, you can opt out whenever you wish, either by:
When you opt out, we will take your name off the requested mailing lists.
We will not give your personal information to other organisations for direct marketing purposes.
If you think that COTA Victoria, a staff member, Board member or volunteer has breached your privacy or someone else’s, you can make a formal complaint.
To make such a complaint, provide details of the incident to the COTA Victoria Privacy Officer:
Post: Manager of Organisational Support
Level 4, 533 Little Lonsdale Street
Melbourne VIC 3000
Tel: 03 9655 2103
We will keep your complaint confidential and handle it according to our complaints policy and procedure, within any timeframes set out in the Privacy Act.
A person can be seriously harmed when there is a data breach to do with:
If we are involved in a personal information data breach that is likely to cause serious harm to someone, we will follow the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner’s (OAIC) guidelines for Notifiable Data Breaches. A Data Breach Notification Plan is considered best practice. It we decide we need a Data Breach Notification Plan, we will develop one following OAIC guidance.
We may change this privacy statement at any time in line with any changes we decide to make to our Privacy Policy. If we make significant changes to this privacy statement, we will contact you and ask you to re-accept this statement. We will do this by email or by putting a notice on our websites.
