RSPCA Victoria Privacy Policy

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Victoria) (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 information about you such as your name, contact details and records of your dealings with us. It may include sensitive information, such as information about your racial or ethnic origin, membership of a professional or trade organisation, criminal background or health information.

What personal information do we collect and hold?

We may collect and hold the following types of personal information:

  • name contact details and date of birth;
  • profession, occupation or job title;
  • if you apply to become an employee or volunteer, information about your
    educational and employment background, a police check, results of pre-placement medical assessments and a working with children check (if you are applying for a position in a program with access to children);
  • if you apply for or undertake one of our courses, your course or training
    progression, assessment and attendance results and the name of your parent or guardian if you are under 18 years of age;
  • details of products and services you have purchased from us, or which you have enquired about, together with any additional information necessary to deliver
    those products and services and to respond to your enquiries;
  • information you provide to us, such as complaints or suggestions, and volunteer or donation information, including through our website (www.rspcavic.org), our representatives, service centres, the websites of our business supporters and when you complete our customer surveys and sign up to our campaigns .

How do we collect your personal information?

We only collect personal information by lawful and fair means, and will generally collect your personal information directly from you through our interactions with you.

This may include where we communicate in person, by telephone, mail, email, or when you submit an application or form to us in person or via our website (such as our eNews alert service).

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, for example, your animal health care professional or your pet insurance provider.

Purposes for handling personal information We collect, hold, use and disclose your personal information so that we can perform our animal welfare, educational and fundraising functions and to provide the best possible quality of supporter and client service.

Your personal information is used for the following purposes:

  •  interacting with you and maintain your details
  •  providing animal intake and care in our shelters
  • facilitating animal adoption and foster care
  • providing veterinary and grooming services
  • facilitating and administering legacies and bequests, including to take care of bequest animals
  • operating respite programs
  • carrying out our retail and sales functions, including accepting product donations, issuing gift cards, and processing payments
  • fundraising and developing and maintaining relationships with our (potential) donors and other supporters
  • providing and developing our educational and training programs
  • managing our membership services
  • assessing applications for employment or volunteering
  • ensuring that we deal with complaints appropriately
  • carrying inspectorate investigatory and enforcement activities (personal
    information about an individual who makes a report is not disclosed except where required by law)
  • performing research and conducting quality assurance
  • providing you with information about activities, events and products that may be of interest to you
  • maintaining our business records and otherwise running our business
  • any purpose required or permitted by law
  • any purpose disclosed to you and to which you have consented, and
  • any purpose that you would otherwise reasonably expect.

Disclosure

We may disclose your personal information to the following parties for the above purposes:

  • our employees, contractors or service providers, including IT services, insurers, financial institutions, debt collection agencies and mailing houses
  • our related companies, member organisations and other business partners
  • your referee, if you have applied to become our employee, volunteer or contractor
  • your parents or guardians, if you are undertaking one of our educational or training courses
  • our professional advisers, including lawyers, accountants, auditors and business advisors
  • 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. We may, from time to time, disclose your personal information to our service providers overseas for the purposes of data storage and cloud computing. The countries to which we disclose personal information are the United States, China, Taiwan, Singapore, Chile, Finland, Belgium, Ireland and the Netherlands.

Access
If you wish to gain access to the information that we hold about you, please 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 use or disclose to third parties is also relevant. 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 and from unauthorized access, modification or disclosure. Our employees and agents are obliged to treat any personal
information held by us confidentially.

Our website
Our website (www.rspcavic.org) uses “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. 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. 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: RSPCA Victoria, 3 Burwood Highway, Burwood East, VIC 3151
Telephone: 03 9224 2222
Email: privacy@rspcavic.org.au

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.

Changes to this Privacy Policy
We may make changes to this Privacy Policy at any time without notice to you. At any time, our current Privacy Policy is available on our website.