Privacy

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The Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts ("us", "we" and "our") is subject to the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs) in the Privacy Act 1988.

Our Privacy Policy sets out what personal information we collect and how we handle it and our general Privacy Collection Notices are provided below.

General information about the Privacy Act and the APPs can also be found on the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner's website.

You can ask us for more information about how we handle personal information or you can ask us to update your own personal information by emailing our Privacy Officer. You can also write to our Privacy Officer as follows:

Privacy Officer
Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts
GPO Box 594
Canberra ACT 2601
Australia

Privacy collection notice—general correspondence

If you contact us, or the Minister's office, your name and contact details may be used to consider your enquiry and to respond to you. We may share your enquiry and your contact details with a third party as necessary to assist us in considering and responding to your enquiry or where your enquiry is more appropriately dealt with by that third party. Otherwise, your personal information will not be used or disclosed for other purposes unless authorised by law.

For further information about our privacy obligations (including how to access or correct personal information that we hold or to make a complaint) please see our Privacy policy.

Privacy collection notice—submissions

If you provide any feedback, submissions or contact details to us ("submission") we may use that information to develop or evaluate programs or policies relevant to your submission and to contact you about your submission.

Disclosure

The department may publish your submission as explained below. We may share your submission and your contact details with a third party as necessary to assist us in considering and responding to your submission or where your submission is more appropriately dealt with by that third party. Otherwise, your submission will not be disclosed to third parties unless authorised or required by law.

Publication

Unless marked confidential (see below) submissions (including the author's name) may be published in part or full on the department's website or in any public response by the department. When publishing, the department will redact any personal contact details of the author.

Confidentiality

Confidential submissions will not be published and will only be disclosed in the following circumstances:

in response to a request by a Commonwealth Minister;
where required by a House or a Committee of the Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia;
where necessary in the public interest; or
where authorised or required by law.

Submissions will only be treated as confidential if they are expressly stated to be confidential. Automatically-generated confidentiality statements or disclaimers appended to an email do not suffice for this purpose. If you wish to make a confidential submission, you must indicate this by ensuring your submission is clearly marked confidential. Even if a submission is not marked confidential, the department may choose not to publish it, or any part of it, at the department's discretion (for example where it includes personal information or opinions about a third party).

We reserve the right not to publish any submission, or any part of a submission, which, in our view, breaches applicable laws, promotes a product or a service, contains offensive language, or does not substantively comment on matters within the scope of review. Our publication of a submission is not an indication of the Commonwealth's endorsement of any views or comments contained in that submission.

In making a submission, you provide the Commonwealth with a permanent, irrevocable, royalty-free licence to use, reproduce, adapt, and communicate your submission both online and in any other related documents (for example, in a future discussion paper or report).

Access

The department will securely store your personal information and the department's privacy policy contains information regarding complaint handling processes and how to access and/or seek correction of personal information held by the Department. For more information see Privacy | Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts.

Privacy collection notice—Webex meetings

The department may use the recording function in Webex to make video and audio recordings of web meetings. Please refer to our Webex Privacy Collection Notice for more information about participating in a recorded Webex meeting.

Information logged

When you browse our website, our server logs the following information from your browser for statistical purposes only:

the type of browser and operating system you are using
your top level domain name (for example .com, .gov, .au, .uk etcetera)
the address of the referring site (for example, the previous site that you visited)
your server's IP address (a number which is unique to the machine through which you are connected to the internet, usually one of your service provider's machines.

Our server also logs the following information:

date and time of your visit
address of the pages accessed and the documents downloaded.

This information is used for the purposes of statistical analysis, system administration, monitoring of our website security, customisation of our website to user needs, evaluation, research, and development.

We won't try to identify you unless there's an investigation: , for example, if a law enforcement agency issues a warrant or subpoena. Your personal Information will be disclosed to third parties only if it's required or authorised by law.

Any information logged is stored securely and archived for a period of at least 12 months and possibly up to seven years.

Electronic mail addresses

We will record your email address only if you send us a message. It will only be used for the purpose for which you provide it. For example, it will not be added to a mailing list unless you request that this be done and we will not disclose it without your consent, unless required by law.

Subscriptions/logins

To subscribe or login to some parts of our website, you must provide either a valid email address or a specific user name and password. These details will only be used for the purpose for which you have provided them and will not be added to any other mailing lists unless you ask us to.

Email mailing list addresses are stored on Swift Digital's server and can be accessed by authorised departmental staff only. Your email address will not be disclosed without your consent, unless required by law.

We use Swift Digital, an online marketing automation and platform service provider to send and manage emails and events. In using this service, Swift Digital may collect personal information which may contain email addresses and other information to be used for the distribution of email campaigns and other important information.

Swift Digital maintains your data in compliance with Australia's Spam Act 2003 and the Privacy Act 1988. All data is maintained within Australia and never leaves Australian jurisdiction. Where stipulated data is encrypted in transit using SSL connections. All data stored via Swift Digital is encrypted at rest.

Website analytics

A cookie is an electronic token that is passed to your browser and your browser passes it back to the server whenever a page is sent to you.

Our server generates one cookie. It's used to keep track of the pages you have accessed while using our server. The cookie allows you to page back and forward through our website and return to pages you have already visited. The cookie exists only for the time you are accessing our server. We don't use it for anything else. We don't use them to collect other personal information.

Please note that some browsers can be configured to allow cookies to be accessed by servers other than the originating server. Most browsers can also be configured to notify the user when a cookie is received, allowing you to either accept or reject it. You do not need to have configured your browser to enable the accepting or sending of cookies to use our website.

Our website also uses Google Analytics, a service which transmits website traffic data to Google servers in the United States. We use Google Analytics in order to understand how users engage with our website. Data transmitted includes, for example, the web address of the page that you're visiting and your IP address. Google may also set cookies on your browser, or read cookies that are already there. Google may transfer this information to third parties where required to do so by law, or where such third parties process the information on Google's behalf.

More information about how Google Analytics collects and processes data is described in Google's Privacy Policy. If you don't want Google Analytics to be used in your browser, you can use the opt-out service provided by Google or the 'incognito' mode in your browser.

Social Networking Services

We use social networking services such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to communicate to the public and potential employees. When you communicate with us using these services we may collect your personal information, but we only use it to help us to communicate with you and the public. The social networking service will also handle your personal information for its own purposes. These sites have their own privacy policies.

Searches

We keep a record of any search terms you use if you're searching our website, but we don't associate that information with other information that we collect. We use these search terms to identify what people are looking for on our website and to improve the services that we provide.

Links to other sites

We might include links to other sites and we use social media sites, for example, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, to make it easy to share information. These other sites might use web measurement tools, customisation technologies and persistent cookies to inform the service they provide to their users. We are not responsible for the privacy practices or the content of other websites, and we do not use, maintain or share personal information that is collected by other websites.

Site feedback

We want your feedback so we can improve the services our website provides.

If you have any comments on the technical operations or functionality of the pages of our website, please use this contact form.

Answering the questions on this form is voluntary and does not in any way affect your access to this website. You do not have to identify yourself, when you are completing the contact form to provide us with site feedback.