Privacy Policy

Your privacy is important and we take care in how we collect, use, disclose and protect your personal information. We handle personal information in accordance with the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) including the Australian Privacy Principles (Privacy Act) and this Policy.

We collect information from members and non-members so that we can provide you with our services, manage our relationship with you, communicate with you effectively and identify which of our services will best suit your needs. We have systems and procedures in place to protect your privacy when we collect, store, use or disclose your personal information.

What kind of personal information do we collect?

Personal information, including sensitive information, that the Australian Water Association collects and holds includes, but is not limited to:

Members' official and preferred names, titles, post-nominals, personal awards, volunteer status, address, telephone, e-mail and contact details (private and business), date of birth, gender
Members' qualifications, education and academic history, work experience and skills, occupation, employer information, insurance details, areas of practice, areas of interest, details of complaints and disciplinary action

Financial details including credit card numbers, bank account information, financial status of membership, and subscriptions to Australian Water Association publications
Information required to nominate members for awards
Information from persons who participate in AWA sponsored seminars, conferences or other events and programs

How we collect your personal information

We collect most personal information direct from you, for example, when you fill in an application for membership. Information may also be collected direct from you when you deal with us personally, over the telephone, send an email or letter, or visit the web site.

There may be occasions when a third party provides information about you, such as when you are nominated for an award.

We also collect information about members and non-members who register for Australian Water Association events, seminars and conferences.

Collecting through our websites

There are a number of ways in which we collect information through our website.

Web analytics

We use Google Analytics to collect traffic data for continually improving our website.

Google Analytics does not associate your IP address with any other data held by Google or store any other information about your visit that may be used to identify you personally from records on Google servers. For more information about what data is collected, see the Google Analytics privacy policy.

To improve our website further, we use Google Analytics Demographic and Interest reporting. These reports associate your visit to our website with Google's estimated data about your age, gender and interest categories. This data is calculated by Google based on any accounts you have with Google products (such as YouTube), as well as your browsing behaviour on third party websites that use the DoubleClick cookie. This data is aggregated by Google Analytics and a privacy threshold is applied so that we cannot identify your demographics and interests on an individual basis.

The Association also uses the Google Analytics UserID feature. If you choose to identify yourself (e.g. by registering or logging in as a member), we will associate your Australian Water Association member ID with your subsequent visits across multiple devices, as well as some internal customer information. All of this associated data is not Personally Identifiable Information, meaning that your private data (e.g. email address, phone number, name etc.) are never stored on Google servers; all that's stored is an anonymised link to these records in our internal database. We follow Google's privacy requirements for UserID, including dissociating your UserID from future browsing if you choose to log out.

From time to time, we also use Google remarketing and interest-based advertising to serve you ads (using Google and third-party vendors) based on your demographics and your behaviour on our website. Any advertising or remarketing lists you may belong to are also subject to Google's privacy thresholds. We cannot serve you ads based on any personally identifiable information (or any sensitive information) and the ad serving cannot be used to individually target any ads to a particular person. For more information, see Google's policy for advertising based on interests and location.

A range of opt-out actions you can take is outlined below:

To remove yourself from a remarketing list or do dissociate your UserID from future browsing, clear your browser cookies
To completely opt out of Google’s remarketing lists and demographic and interest-based classification, visit Google’s Ad Settings page.
To opt out of your usage data being reported to Google Analytics for this website, refuse or clear the relevant first party cookies (called _ga and _gat) associated with this website.

To completely opt out of your usage data being reported in Google Analytics for any website, install Google's official opt-out browser add-on

Cookies

A cookie is a small file containing a string of characters that is sent to your computer when you visit a website. When you visit the site again, the cookie allows that site to recognize your browser. Cookies may store user preferences and other information.  

Cookies provide a convenience feature to save you time, or tell the web server that you have returned to a specific page. 

We use cookies for several reasons. Some cookies are required for technical reasons in order for our websites to operate, and we refer to these as "essential" or "strictly necessary" cookies. Other cookies also enable us to track and target the interests of our users to enhance your experience on our websites and subscription service.  For example, AWA keeps track of the websites and pages you visit, in order to determine what portion of the AWA website or subscription service is the most popular or most used. This data is used to deliver customised content and promotions within the AWA website and subscription service to members and visitors whose behaviour indicates that they are interested in a particular subject area.

You have the right to decide whether to accept or reject cookies. You can set or amend your web browser controls to accept or refuse cookies. If you choose to reject cookies, you may still use our website though your access to some functionality and areas of our website may be restricted. As the means by which you can refuse cookies through your web browser controls vary from browser-to-browser, you should visit your browser's help menu for more information.

Embedded videos on our website

We use Google’s YouTube site to host videos which are embedded on our website. Embedded videos on our website use YouTube’s Privacy Enhanced Mode. When you play an embedded video from our website, the video and associated assets will load from the domain www.youtube-nocookie.com, and other domains associated with Google’s YouTube player.

YouTube collects information about user activity including videos watched and interactions with content and ads. These analytics are made available to the OAIC, and we use this information to understand how our videos perform. You can access the privacy policy for YouTube on the Google website.

How we use your personal information

We will use your personal information to provide you with a particular product or service and to contact you about matters pertaining to membership of AWA. This includes (but is not limited to) the following:

Membership applications
Processing payments
Providing membership services such as e-newsletters, Water Journal, Digital Marketplace, and other member benefits
Inviting you to attend and participate in events, technical seminars, professional development and networking activities
Contacting board/ panel and committee members to distribute business papers

We may use your personal information for purposes related or ancillary to the main reason we collect it, such as:

Internal accounting and administration
Regulatory reporting and compliance
Helping us to identify and inform you about other services that may be of benefit to you

As a not-for-profit organisation, the Australian Water Association enters into sponsorship arrangements with third parties from time to time. This allows us to keep membership fees at a low level, and to provide a greater range of services. When we enter a sponsorship agreement, we may use your personal information to provide you with information about products, services and promotions offered by our sponsors.

Disclosure of your personal information

We disclose a member's mailing details (i.e. name and address) to mailing houses for the purpose of mailing publications, event information etc. In these situations, we prohibit third parties from using personal information about you except for the specific purpose for which we supply it.

We treat all personal information held about you as confidential. This applies except where disclosure of your personal information is compelled by law, in the public interest, or with your consent.

Accuracy of your personal information

If we have accurate personal information about you, it enables us to provide you with the best possible service. We take reasonable steps to ensure that your personal information is accurate, complete and up to date whenever we collect or use it.

If you find that the personal information we hold about you is inaccurate, incomplete or out of date, please contact us immediately. Alternatively, you may correct this yourself by logging in to our website.

Security of your personal information

The Australian Water Association protects any personal information that we hold about you from misuse and loss. We protect your privacy by restricting access to your personal information to those staff or authorised office bearers who need it, either to process information or to provide you with membership services. Our staff and office bearers are responsible for handling personal information in accordance with the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth).

Your personal information may be stored as hardcopy documents, or as electronic data. We maintain physical security over our paper and electronic data stores and premises. We also maintain computer and network security. For example, we use firewalls (security measures for the Internet) and other security systems such as user identifiers and passwords to control access to computer systems.

The Australian Water Association will keep your information for as long as it is needed to provide you with the products and services you have requested from us. We will take reasonable steps to destroy or permanently de-identify personal information when we no longer need it.

We are committed to keeping your information safe. We implement a variety of appropriate security measures to ensure your information is protected. These are reviewed and updated as appropriate.

We use third party providers to store our data, including personal information and we ensure that our third party data stores and providers meet Australian privacy and security requirements.