Privacy Policy

Placenames and its associated businesses (We) recognise the trust you are placing in us through your interaction with our services. We will do everything within our control to ensure your trust is upheld. We are committed to the protection of all personal information that becomes known to us. Our policies comply with our legal obligations and are intended to protect your privacy as we collect, use, disclose and retain information we gather about you.

You can visit any Placenames website without identifying yourself (or your company) or having to reveal any information about yourself (or your company).

Disclosing your information

We appreciate the importance of your privacy, and only disclose your personal information to third parties in certain limited circumstances subject to appropriate privacy and confidentiality protections.

The organisations to which we usually disclose information include:

• our related businesses and bodies corporate
• outsourced service providers who manage some of the services we provide to you, including those who manage our:
• datacentre facilities
• customer inquiries
• mailing systems
• billing functions
• marketing functions.
• government and regulatory authorities and other organisations, as required or authorised by law
• other credit providers for credit related purposes such as credit-worthiness and financing, and
• our professional advisers, including our accountants, auditors and lawyers

Your personal information: what do we collect, and how do we use it?

• We do not collect personal information when you visit our site unless you:
• register with us or
• log on and place an advertisement (after registering) with us.
• When you place an advertisement with us you will be asked for the following personal or company information:
• your name
• company name (if applicable)
• email address
• contact details
• We may share this information, and only that information which is absolutely necessary, with those third parties that are involved in the processing of your advertisement. For example, the financial institution that processes your credit card transaction associated with paying for the advertisement (PayPal is a member of the e-Bay companies).
• Clearly, any information you specify to appear within a Placenames advertisement will be shared with all visitors to the site.
• We do not share, sell, rent or barter any identifiable personal information to any third party without your permission.
• When you log on to our site, we will ask you your email address (which will become your user ID) and your password. We store your password in readable form.
• If you forget your password, we will email it in readable form to the email address you use as your user ID.
• We may send information to registered Placenames customers about special deals we are offering. We may ask for information which identifies you as a Placenames member. There will be an option to unsubscribe to such information, if you do not wish to receive it.
• When you submit feedback or questions via email, or contact us for information about our web sites, we will request your name and email address. We use this information solely to respond to your enquiries.
• When you enter a Placenames contest or other promotional feature, we may ask for your name, address, and email address so we can administer the contest and notify winners. We may ask for other information to enable us to improve our web sites or to send you special offers.
• Our web sites contain links to other sites. Placenames is not responsible for the privacy practices or the content of other web sites.

Cookies - How They Are Used

A "cookie" is a small piece of data that is sent to your browser from a web server and stored on your computer's hard drive. Cookies do not damage your computer. We may use cookies to help us provide personalised services. For example, we can store your postcode in a cookie so we can show you local weather each time you visit our site. Cookies also make web surfing easier for you by saving your preferences while you're on our web sites.

You can decide if you want to accept cookies by changing the settings on your computer. You can reset your browser to refuse all cookies, or allow your browser to show you when a cookie is being sent. If you do not accept cookies, then some of our features may not work as we intended them to work.

Use of IP Addresses

An Internet Protocol (IP) address is a set of numbers that is automatically assigned to your computer whenever you log on to your Internet service provider or through your home PC, company's Local Area Network (LAN) or Wide Area Network (WAN). Web servers, the powerful computers that provide web pages for viewing, automatically identify your computer by the IP address assigned to it during your session online.

We may collect IP addresses for some purposes (for example, to report on anonymous user information and to audit the use of our web sites). We do not link a user's IP address to a person's personal information, which means we will have a record of each user's session but the user remains anonymous to us.

By default all web server log files capture IP addresses. We may use your IP address to help diagnose problems with our server, administer our web sites and to track web usage. This information is used internally and is not shared with anyone else.

PLEASE NOTE: Under certain circumstances, IP addresses and/or domain names may be linked to personally identifiable information, when this information is stored in databases managed by Internet registrars or registries.

Emails from Placenames web sites

Placenames maintain an opt-out, user-customisable subscription service of email addresses of people requesting promotional emails.

We do not want to send emails to you if you would prefer not to receive them. Therefore, every email provides a way for you to unsubscribe from future emails.

Security

We operate on secure data networks protected by industry standard firewall and password protection. We have security measures in place to attempt to protect against the loss, misuse and alteration of your user data under our control.

Only a small number of personnel have access to the information you provide us. For example, we impose strict rules on personnel who have access either to the databases that store user information or to the servers that host our services. While we cannot guarantee that loss, misuse or alteration to data will not occur, we use our best endeavours to prevent such occurrences.

For credit card transactions, Placenames adds security by using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) technology via the PayPal secure payments company (PayPal is a subsidiary of e-Bay). This means that the credit card information you send is encrypted by your computer, and then decrypted again on the PayPal side, preventing others from accessing your private information in between. So, when using an SSL capable browser, shopping on a Placenames web site is the safest kind of transaction possible with a credit card. In addition, Placenames never stores or knows your credit card details, as the transaction is directly between yourself and PayPal.

Changes to our Privacy Policy

We reserve the right to change this Privacy Policy at any time. As we plan to keep our statement on privacy current, please return periodically to any of our web sites to review the latest version of our Privacy Policy.

More information on privacy legislation is available from the Australian Federal Privacy Commissioner at www.privacy.gov.au.

If something goes wrong

Please email privacy-officer@placenames.com.au if you believe:

• someone has gained access to your personal information due to our mistake, or
• we have breached our privacy obligations or your privacy rights in any way

We will endeavour to satisfy any questions that you have and correct any errors on our part where appropriate.