1. Introduction
Proof Communications values the privacy of our website viewers and our clients. This Privacy Policy covers our websites https://proofcommunications.com.au and https://proofcommunications.com.au and all businesses and services of Proof Communications, including Tender Writers, and sets out how we handle your personal and client information. In this document we refer to Proof Communications as “we”, “our” or “Proof Communications”.
Proof Communications
Level 5, 203-233 New South Head Road
Edgecliff NSW 2027
Australia
2. Definitions
“Client” or “Customer” means the customer who has received services or products provided by Proof Communications, including customer support.
“Client Records” means personal data, reports, purchases and services history, communications, and information supplied by the client, or to the client from Proof Communications, that is stored on our services or our third party providers.
“Personal Data” means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person; in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, location data, IP address, email and phone number.
“Public Area” means the area of our website that can be accessed both by users and visitors, without needing to login.
“Restricted Area” means the area of our website that can be accessed only by users who have login access.
“User” means an employee, agent or representative of a client, who primarily uses restricted areas of our website.
“Visitor” means an individual who uses the public area of our website only and does not access restricted areas or request our services.
3. Information we collect
a) Our services
We may collect personally identifiable information about our clients and users, such as your full name, phone number, email address, mailing address, geographic area, or similar, when you contact us or request our services. Any telephone conversations or online voice and video conversations (for example Skype and Zoom) may be monitored or recorded in order to facilitate staff training and for verification purposes. If you choose to purchase a product or service from us, we or our third-party processors will collect your payment information. We do not send any promotional emails, unless you have opted into our email marketing communications, however we may send you service and product related emails if you are our client.
b) Our websites
We may collect basic visitor and user data when you navigate our website, including IP address, browser and device type, geographic location, and information about previous visits. Personal and business details may be collected from those who engage our services or contact us, such as when filling in a form on our website, purchasing a product, sending an email, joining our mailing lists, or contacting us using other channels of communication.
Tracking technologies such as cookies, beacons, tags and scripts are used by Proof Communications and our analytics and service providers, to analyse trends, administer the services provided on the website including user preferences, track user interaction, as well as for security purposes. We may receive reports based on the use of these technologies by such companies.
We use Clicky Analytics for tracking analytics, Mailchimp and GetSiteControl for managing our email subscriptions and campaigns. Some or all of these tools may be used to track information about your behaviour on our website. Please visit the respective websites of these services for more information, and sections 3c and 4b of this privacy policy.
Social Media Widgets: Our websites may use social media features such as social sharing buttons and social widgets. These features may collect your browsing information including IP address and the page that you are visiting on our websites, and set cookies to enable the feature to function correctly. Social media widgets are either hosted by a third-party or hosted directly on our websites; as such your interactions with these features is governed by the privacy policies of the third-party organisations that are providing the widget.
Embedded Content: Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.
These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracing your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.
c) Access and retention of data
We retain client records including personal data for as long as needed to provide our services and to comply with our legal obligations. An individual who wishes to correct, amend or delete inaccurate personal data should email to rosemary@proofcommunications.com.au.
We use the Google Analytics Data Retention controls to set a time period of 26 months before user-level and event-level data stored by Google Analytics is automatically deleted from Analytic’s servers. This is a new setting available from Google, that comes into effect after May 25th 2018. More information is available at https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/7667196?hl=en.
We use Clicky Analytics to log and analyse the traffic to our web site. You may review Clicky’s privacy policy at https://clicky.com/terms/privacy. A “Unique ID” tracking cookie is used for the “legitimate purpose” of identifying unique visitors, but otherwise no “personal data” is logged. Clicky Analytics retains visitor and action logs for a minimum of 6 months and logs are purged by Clicky Analytics from their servers at certain intervals (every 1-2 years).
WordPress is the website content management system that we use for our website. When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection. An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment. If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognise and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue. For users that register on our website, we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information. If you wish to have a copy of your personal data that has been collected and stored on our website, or if you wish to have your personal data deleted from our website, please email to rosemary@proofcommunications.com.au. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes. If you upload images to our website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included as visitors to our website can download and extract any location data from images on our website.
Mailchimp stores information about our subscribers including first name and last name, email address, the method of signup and details of interactions with email newsletter campaigns. This service is provided by Mailchimp and their terms and conditions, and their privacy policy at https://mailchimp.com/legal/privacy/, govern the use of this data. We do not sell our email lists, and we use this information only for the purposes as stated in our privacy policy. If you wish to access or update your personal data then you may click on the links in the footer of our email newsletters. If you wish to have all your personal data deleted from all our mailing lists at Mailchimp, please email to rosemary@proofcommunications.com.au.
GetSiteControl collects personal data including name and email address when you fill in a subscribe widget on our website. This information is processed and transferred to Mailchimp for our email marketing services. GetSiteControl do not share your personal data with any third parties. The information is retained on their servers until a widget is deleted, or we terminate our account with GetSiteControl. If you wish to have all your personal data deleted from our subscribe widget records at GetSiteControl, please email to rosemary@proofcommunications.com.au.
We use the WordPress plugin WPForms for our contact and support forms on this website. When you submit a form your IP is recorded along with the information you provide, which is stored on our website’s database and transmitted to Proof Communications. The form submissions are deleted from our website database at set intervals, however the information may be recorded on our email servers, and the third-party services we use, for the purposes of managing our customer support and our business services.
4. How we use your information
a) Overview
We use the information we collect to operate and maintain our websites and our services, send you marketing communications, and provide support. Client records including personal data are used to provide services and information that you request, to respond to comments and questions, and to provide support and service to our clients.
Visitor data is used to enhance our websites by understanding how and what visitors are looking for, as well as helping us to monitor our traffic for performance, security and usability. Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.
b) Cookies
We use automatically collected information through cookies and similar technologies to personalise our service, provide customised content, for authentication, to monitor the effectiveness of marketing activities and analyse site usage metrics. Users and visitors can control the use of cookies at individual browser level or by using our cookie settings options (see below). If you choose to reject cookies you may still use our site, however some features may be limited or not work as intended. You can obtain more information about cookies by visiting http://www.allaboutcookies.org/.
If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.
If you have an account and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser. When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed. If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after one day.
We use Google Analytics and Clicky Analytics to measure and analyse the traffic on the Public Area of our website, not the restricted area, and this visitor data is anonymised. Although there is currently no agreed standard for Do Not Track (DNT), if we detect that you have enabled DNT in your browser, then we disable the tracking of Clicky Analytics. For more information about DNT, visit https://www.eff.org/issues/do-not-track. If you wish to opt-out of all Google Analytics tracking you may choose to use the Google Analytics opt-out browser addon, for more information visit https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/181881. If you wish to opt-out of all Clicky Analytics tracking you may choose to use the tracking opt out at https://clicky.com/optout. Google and Clicky Analytics operate independently from us and have their own privacy policies, which we suggest you review, as they may use information collected. For more information see https://policies.google.com/privacy and https://clicky.com/terms/. We take measures to protect the technical information collected by our use of these tracking services, and the data is not used to identify visitors or users.
5. How we share your information
a) Personally identifiable information
Any personally identifiable information you make public on our sites through public profile pages or posting comments on our blog will be available to others. If you remove information that you have made public, copies may remain viewable in cached and archived pages of our website, backups, or if other users have copied or saved that information.
We work with partner and third party providers who provide services to us including customer support, processing transactions, copywriting, graphic design, development, domain management, hosting, CRM, project, team and task management and SEO. We may store personal information in locations outside the direct control of Proof Communications (for instance on servers or databases with our hosting suppliers, cloud storage, project, team and task management software and CRM software). These third parties may have access to, or process client records including personal data, as part of providing those services to us. We limit the information provided to those services to that which is reasonably necessary for them to perform their functions and to deliver the intended service, and take reasonable steps to ensure that organisations are bound by confidentiality and privacy obligations in relation to the protection of your personally identifiable information.
We will disclose client records and personal data if required to comply with the law, to enforce our terms of service, or to protect the rights, property or personal safety of Proof Communications, our users or others.
b) Non personally identifiable information
We may provide certain automatically collected, non personally identifiable information to third parties for various purposes including compliance with reporting obligations and for business and marketing purposes. We take reasonable measures to maintain secure transfer and storage of information, however electronic communications and databases are subject to errors, tampering and unauthorised access.
c) Testimonials
We display personal testimonials of satisfied customers on our site in addition to other endorsements. With your consent we may also post your name alongside your testimonial. If you wish to delete your testimonial please contact us at rosemary@proofcommunications.com.au.
6. How we protect your information
Proof Communications is concerned with protecting your privacy and data, however we cannot ensure or warrant the security of any information you transmit to Proof Communications, or guarantee that your information stored on Proof Communications’ website and third party services may not be accessed, disclosed, altered or destroyed by breach of any of our industry safeguards. We follow generally accepted industry standards to protect the information submitted to us, both during transmission and once we receive it. When you enter sensitive information on our forms we use secure socket technology (SSL), however no method of electronic transmission or electronic storage is 100% secure. When we store your information on third party services we use password protection and two factor authentication where available, to further protect access to your information. If you have any questions about our security please contact us at rosemary@proofcommunications.com.au.
7. Links
Our websites may have links to other websites, provided for your convenience and information. Proof Communications is not responsible for the content on these sites and no endorsement or association is implied. We are not responsible for the privacy practices employed by websites or services that we link to from our websites or our services, including the information and content contained therein. When you click on these links you are moving to another website and service, and our privacy policy and terms and conditions do not apply to third party services and websites. Please review their policies for how they collect, manage and use your browsing and interactions, and your personal data.
8. Changes
Proof Communications may make changes to this privacy policy at any time by updating this page at https://proofcommunications.com.au/privacy-policy/ and https://proofcommunications.com.au/privacy-policy/. All changes are effective when posted on this page. Rosemary Gillespie is our Privacy Officer. You can contact her at rosemary@proofcommunications.com.au. The content of this site is protected by copyright laws. © 2008-2018 Proof Communications. If you have any questions about this privacy policy, the practices of this website, or our services please contact us at rosemary@proofcommunications.com.au.
Last updated: 14th June 2018