Privacy Statement
Tenancy WA Inc. (TWA) takes your privacy seriously and complies with the Australian Privacy Principles in the collection, storage and destruction of personal information about any person or organisation that interacts with our community legal centre. If you are a client, your privacy is also important to us as it helps us protect the legal professional privilege that may apply to your personal information.
This Privacy Statement tells you:
• how to get a copy of our full Privacy Policy
• what personal information we collect and what we do with it
• about our website and information it collects from you
• how we respect your privacy
• how we keep your information secure
• how to ask us to access or correct your personal information or make a complaint.
A full copy of our Privacy Policy is available as a printable version. If you need it in another format to meet your needs, please let us know by email at admin@tenancywa.org.au or by phoning TWA’s Administration Officer on (08) 6263 8556. We’ll get a copy of our Privacy Policy to you in a format that meets your needs as soon as possible.
Your personal information & what we do with it.
When you contact TWA by email, letter, telephone or by completing the message link on our website, you will be giving us your personal information, which may include:
• your name and other names you have been known by in the past
• your address and contact details
• your date of birth and
• the name of the other party (if any) in your legal dispute, including their date of birth if you know it
• information about your legal problem.
Other organisations who may contact us on your behalf with your permission, may also give us personal information about you so we can decide whether we can help you with a tenancy problem.
We use your personal information to:
• Decide if we can help you with a tenancy related legal problem or
• To avoid conflicts of interest or
• Refer you for help elsewhere or
• Give you general legal information and potentially specialist legal advice and representation about your individual situation.
We are also in the process of merging with two other community legal centres. Once the three organisations have merged, our services will be provided by a new organisation with a different name. We may share your personal information with these other organisations to determine and avoid any potential conflicts of interest. To prove to our funders that we do our job and to analyse how we are helping people so we can improve our services, TWA will sometimes use de-identified data generated from your personal information to create reports for our funders, ourselves and our Annual Report. We may also use the de-identified data for research informing our law reform and advocacy work.
The data in our reports and research may include:
• The number of people getting in touch with our centre
• The number and types of legal problems they have and how we help them
• The number of people we couldn’t help and whether we could send them for help elsewhere
• Whether the legal help people received solved their tenancy problem.
The data in the reports and research TWA creates never identifies any individual person’s personal information.
We never give your personal information to any other person or organisation without your permission, unless we are required to do so by law or as otherwise set out in the Privacy Statement.
Your personal information and our website
TWA also collects information about you when you visit this website. Our computer system logs the following information for statistical purposes:
• user’s server or proxy address
• type of browser you are using
• date/time of the visit
• pages accessed and documents downloaded
We use this information to analyse our server traffic. We do not attempt to identify users or their browsing activities except where authorised or required by law. For example if there is an investigation, a law enforcement agency may exercise their legal authority to inspect the internet service provider’s logs.
TWA’s website has links to content and websites of other organisations. TWA does not know whether those organisations take your privacy as seriously as we do nor whether they comply with the Australian Privacy Principles. TWA is not responsible for the privacy practices or the content of any of those linked websites. To protect your privacy on any linked websites, you will need to read their Privacy Statements and make a decision for yourself.
TWA respects your privacy
We respect your privacy. In dealing with your personal information TWA:
• Never gives anyone outside TWA your personal information without your written permission, unless we are required to do so by law or as set out in this Privacy Statement.
• Never sells your personal information to any person or organisation under any circumstances
• Never gives your personal information to any person or organisation overseas under any circumstances without your permission.
We only use your personal information for the reasons you have given it to us for and to create the types of reports described above.
If we hope to use your personal information for any other reason, for example – for research or to create TWA case studies for professional purposes, we will contact you and ask for your permission in writing if we have not already done so.
Keeping your personal information secure
Your personal information is kept securely by TWA in either digital or hardcopy format while we are helping you with your legal problem and then it is securely stored for seven years (or for longer as may be needed by legislation applying to your situation).
After that time TWA securely destroys and disposes of your personal information. TWA never keeps any original documents you may give to us. They are always returned to you by the time your TWA legal file is closed. TWA double checks to make sure it has returned any original documents you may have given us before final records destruction and disposal takes place.
All TWA staff, volunteers and Management Committee members sign confidentiality agreements in which they agree to comply with TWA’s privacy obligations to you. They also receive regular training in privacy and confidentiality protection and secure records management.
TWA has secure, locked facilities in its offices for storing all hardcopy documents and onsite computer records containing your personal information. TWA contracts IT specialists to maintain our computer server in secured premises within the Perth metropolitan area. The server is protected by up to data protection software, daily data backup and it is subject to the protection of Australian privacy and information technology data laws. TWA does not send any digital or hardcopy data for storage at overseas facilities.
TWA regularly assesses ongoing risks related to maintaining the security of personal information held by it and takes all reasonable precautions to ensure security is maintained overtime for all hardcopy and digital records.
Accessing or correcting your personal information or making a Privacy Complaint
Please contact our Privacy Contact Officer, TWA’s Principal Solicitor at admin@tenancywa.org.au or by phoning (08) 6263 8556 or by writing to them at: 2/18 Plain St East Perth WA 6004 if you wish to :
• have access to your personal information
• check your personal information held with us is correct,
• change incorrect personal information we hold about you, or
• make a complaint about a breach of your privacy or how we are handling your personal information.
TWA’s Privacy Contact Officer will respond to your request or any complaint about privacy within 30 days.
There is generally no cost for making a request to access or correct personal information. If we cannot comply with your request, we will let you know why and what next steps you may take if you’re not satisfied with our explanation. If you are enquiring from overseas, we will need extra information from you and dealing with your request may take longer and include a cost to cover our reasonable expenses.
If you’re not satisfied with how we’ve handled a privacy complaint, you can find more information at www.oaic.gov.au or contact the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner by telephone: 1300 363 992 or email: enquiries@oaic.gov.au or by letter to: GPO Box 5218, Sydney NSW 2001 or GPO Box 2999, Canberra ACT 2601.