Privacy Policy

Lort Smith (ABN 87 004 238 475) (we, us, our) respects your privacy and is committed to protecting your personal information and complying with its obligations under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) (Privacy Act). This Privacy Policy explains how we handle your personal information, and the ways in which you can contact us regarding the personal information that we hold about you.

What is personal information?

Personal information is any information or opinion about an identified individual or an individual who is reasonably identifiable. For example, personal information may include:

  • an individual’s name, signature, postal or email addresses, phone number or date of birth;
  • photographs;
  • financial information; and
  • sensitive information (see below).

Sensitive information is personal information that includes information or an opinion about an individual’s:

  • racial or ethnic origin;
  • political opinions or associations;
  • religious or philosophical beliefs;
  • sexual orientation or practices;
  • criminal record; and
  • health or genetic information.

Generally, sensitive information has a higher level of privacy protection than other personal information. Lort Smith rarely collects sensitive information.

Types of personal information we collect

During the provision of our services, including if you access our website, we may collect your personal information.

We generally collect the following types of personal information:

Clients

We collect a range of personal information about our clients, including:

  • names, addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses and other contact details and dates of birth;
  • credit card, direct debit and other financial information;
  • health care cards, senior cards;
  • insurance information; and
  • information about clients’ requirements and the services we provide to clients.

Volunteers

We also collect personal information about our volunteers and prospective volunteers, including:

  • names, addresses and contact details; and
  • police checks.

Job applicants and contractors

We collect and hold certain personal information about applicants for employment with us and contractors wishing to supply products and/or services to us as well as their employees, including:

  • resumes, employment histories and qualifications;
  • training records and competency assessments;
  • results of psychometric testing where applicable; and
  • police checks and other suitability checks.

Purposes for handling personal information

We collect, hold, use and disclose your personal information for the following purposes:

  • to provide services to you and your pets;
  • to interact with you;
  • to carry out transactions with you, such as to process payments received by you via direct debit;
  • to do fundraising and to develop and maintain relationships with our (potential) donors and other supporters;
  • to do research and conduct quality assurance;
  • to provide you with information about activities and events that may be of interest to you;
  • to assess your suitability to become a volunteer, employee or contractor;
  • any purpose required or permitted by law;
  • any purpose disclosed to you and to which you have consented;
  • any purpose that you would otherwise reasonably expect; and
  • to maintain our business records and otherwise to run our business.

Collection

We collect personal information from individuals with whom we deal. We only collect personal information by lawful and fair means. We will collect your personal information through our interactions with you, such as where we communicate in person, by telephone, mail, email, or when you submit a form on our website. In some cases, where it is unreasonable or impracticable to obtain your personal information directly from you, we will seek to obtain it from a publicly available source, or a third party.

Disclosure

We will not sell, share or rent any of your person information to third parties, other than to the extent set out in this Privacy Policy. We may disclose your personal information to third parties, such as:

  • our service providers, including IT services, insurers, financial institutions, debt collection agencies, mailing houses;
  • our related companies, member organisations and other business partners;
  • our professional advisers, including lawyers, accountants and auditors;
  • government, regulatory and law enforcement authorities; and
  • your agents and representatives.

We may disclose your personal information to third parties overseas, including our business partners, service providers and advisers, as well as your agents and representatives. The countries to which we disclose personal information differ depending on the issue.

Access

If you wish to gain access to the information that we hold about you, you may contact our Privacy Officer on the details provided below. We will respond to all requests for access. On the rare occasions when we refuse access, we will provide you with a written notice stating our reasons for refusing access and the provisions of the Privacy Act on which we rely to refuse access. We may charge you our reasonable costs for providing you with access to your personal information.

Accuracy

We take reasonable steps to ensure that the personal information that we collect, hold and use is accurate, up-to-date and complete, and that the personal information that we disclose to third parties is also relevant. As such, we encourage you to contact us if you believe that any of the personal information that we hold about you is inaccurate, outdated, incomplete, irrelevant or misleading. You may request that we correct that information by contacting our Privacy Officer on the details provided below.

We will respond to all requests to correct personal information. We are not obliged to correct any of your personal information if we do not agree that it requires correction and we may refuse to do so. If we refuse, we will provide you with a written notice explaining the basis for our refusal.

Security

We hold your personal information in both paper-based and electronic files. Electronic information is stored on secure servers that are protected in controlled facilities. In some cases, these facilities may be overseas. We seek to ensure that personal information that we hold is protected from misuse, interference and loss caused by unauthorised access, modification or disclosure.

Our employees and agents are obliged to treat any personal information held by us confidentially.

Our website

Our website (www.lortsmith.com) utilises “cookies”, which are pieces of data that are stored on your hard drive containing details about your use of our website. Cookies do not provide us with information about you that can be used to identify you, rather, they anonymously track usage of our website, so that we can enhance users’ experience of our website. You may elect to reject cookies and still use our website, however in doing so, you may be unable to access certain pages.

We also use IP addresses to analyse trends, administer our website, track use movements on our website, and gather broad demographic data for aggregate use, which we may share with our partners and advertisers. We note that IP addresses are not linked to any information that could identify you.

Marketing

We may use the personal information that we hold about you, including your contact details, to provide you with information about activities and events that may be of interest to you, or to seek your support for our activities. These may be activities and events provided by us, our business partners or third parties. We may also disclose your personal information to our service providers to assist us with these communications. You may opt out of receiving all or certain types of marketing information from us at any time by contacting us on the details provided below.

Questions and complaints

If you have any questions, concerns or complaints about the way in which we have handled your personal information, or if you believe that we have not complied with our obligations under the Privacy Act, please contact our Privacy Officer:

Postal address: 24 Villiers Street, North Melbourne, VIC 3051
Telephone: 03 9287 6406
Fax: 03 9329 5347
Email: privacyofficer@lortsmith.com

Once we receive a complaint, we will respond to you as soon as possible and will let you know if we need any further information from you. We will notify you of our decision within 30 days, however, if we are unable to do so, we will let you know the reason for the delay and the expected timeframe for resolving the complaint.

If you are not satisfied with our response, you can contact the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.

Further information can be found at www.oaic.gov.au/privacy/making-a-privacy-complaint.

Changes to this Privacy Policy

We may make changes to this Privacy Policy at any time without notice to you.