Voices For Freedom is committed to protecting your privacy. Read our privacy statement below and find out how to contact us if you have concerns about the use of your personal information.

Voices For Freedom (VFF) is committed to protecting your privacy.

  • VFF is committed to ensuring the privacy of your personal information and complying with the Privacy Act 2020. Your personal information is stored in secure databases that are managed by VFF.
  • Your personal information remains private and confidential to VFF. Without your permission we do not rent, sell, or exchange your personal information.
  • Unless we reasonably believe that we are required to do so by law, we will only pass on your information to other organisations where we intend to communicate with you through third parties contracted to supply services to VFF
  • If you are under 16 years old, please ask your parent or guardian before signing up on this site, to our emails or socials, or making any purchases from our shop.

Collection of personal information

VFF collects information about our supporters, customers, donors, coordinators, members and those who volunteer their time, prospective and current employees/contractors, and website/mobile app users, including:

  • Personal information that you provide voluntarily for example when registering, completing forms, in correspondence with us, when you purchase our merchandise and/or services, as a VFF coordinator or member and/or someone who volunteers their time, and/or if you apply for a role with us or if we need information about you, pertinent to your contract;
  • Website usage information through tracking your individual click behaviour;
  • Aggregated website traffic information collected by our web server or third party systems we subscribe to.

We explain the ways we collect personal information in more detail below.

Use of personal information

Your personal information enables us to:

  • Verify your identity;
  • Communicate with you on matters that may be of interest to you;
  • Respond to your requests, inquiries, feedback, or customer service related activities;
  • Process your donations or any purchases accurately and securely;
  • Communicate with you on matters relevant to your donations or purchases;
  • Provide you with any services that we offer;
  • Improve our website, applications, webinars and socials so we can give you a better online experience;
  • Consider you for volunteer and/or contract positions with VFF;
  • Provide you with any other services you have requested;
  • To conduct research and statistical analysis (on an anonymised basis);
  • Enable us to contact you or keep you safe when volunteering for us;
  • Protect and/or enforce our legal rights and interests, including defending any claim;
  • Comply with the Privacy Act 2020 and for any other purpose authorised by law;
  • Use the information for any other purposes for which you have given us your permission.

Retention of your personal information

We will retain personal information that we collect for as long as it is required for the purpose/s for which it was collected, or otherwise as required by law.

In most cases, once personal information is no longer required, we will securely destroy it or otherwise delete all identifying details so that only anonymised data is retained.

When you choose to leave VFF as a coordinator or member, or if you are a VFF coordinator or member and you pass away, we will aim to deactivate your membership status in our records as soon as possible after learning of your choice or passing. Your membership status will be listed as inactive, but your membership details including the associated personal information will be retained for our ongoing business purposes (which include but are not limited to providing historical records).

When you submit personal information, a secure server is used. We protect your information during transmission by using the Secure Sockets Layer over Transport Layer Security (SSL over TLS) protocol, which encrypts your information when transmitted over the Internet. You can check that the SSL is active by looking for the padlock symbol on many browsers.

Access to your personal information

We take all reasonable steps to ensure that your personal information that we hold is accurate, up to date, complete, relevant, and not misleading. Please feel free to contact our Head of Legal ([email protected]) to talk to us about your personal information or the communication we send you. We are happy to provide you with any personal information that we hold about you. If it is wrong we will correct it.

Giving you control – communication from Voices For Freedom

From time to time, VFF will send you communications that we feel are appropriate to the nature of your relationship with us, for example: if you make a donation to a specific project, you may receive information about future projects; or if you are a coordinator or member you may receive communications about further opportunities as a coordinator or member or updates with respect to relevant issues eg a select committee bill.

Unsubscribe policy

We strive to only send emails to those who want to receive them. If you would not like to receive future emails from us, please use the ‘unsubscribe’ link located at the bottom of our email communications. Please note that when you ‘unsubscribe’ we may still email you with specific information, where it is relevant to your relationship with us.

Please feel free to contact our help desk ([email protected]) to manage the communication we send.

Website and email privacy and security

We take the security of your personal information seriously. We take all reasonable steps to ensure that we keep your personal information secure, both in electronic and hard copy format, and to protect against loss, unauthorised access, use, modification, disclosure, or other misuse.

Cookies

Cookies are small pieces of information that can be stored on your computer’s hard drive (persistent cookies) or its memory (session cookies). Cookies help VFF understand which parts of our website are the most popular, where our visitors are going, and how long they spend there. We use cookies to learn how we can make our website more useful and interesting for you.

Cookies will not collect identifiable information about you but will identify your device. You may disable cookies by changing the settings on your browser, although this may mean that you cannot use all of the features of our website.

Overseas software providers, website, email and webinar monitoring and measurement

VFF uses third party based software providers (with comparable safeguards), to collect certain information including on how you use our website, emails, applications and webinars.

Some of these providers collect private information such as, email, full name, and association to VFF local groups and interests for subscription emails.

VFF uses the monitoring services to aggregate website, email, socials, software and webinar statistics, such as number of page views, the number of unique visitors, time spent on our site or email, and to determine messaging effectiveness.

On occasion, random short surveys may also be used to collect further information about our users – participation in these surveys will be entirely voluntary.

Credit and debit card security

We use a third party payment processing system that is accredited and PCI compliant. We do not collect or store your credit or debit card details on any purchases or donations.

It is important for you to protect against unauthorised access to your password and to your computer. Ensure you logout when you have finished, especially if using a shared computer.

External links

From time to time there may be links on our website that take you to other websites outside of our service. Any links provided to third party websites are provided solely for your convenience. The operation and content of such third party websites is beyond our control; we do not endorse in any manner whatsoever, or accept any responsibility for, the content or other material that may be contained on such websites, the use of such websites, or any products or services advertised on or sold through any such websites. We will not be liable under any circumstances for any damages whatsoever, direct or indirect, resulting from any use of this website or any third party website linked to this website, whether or not we are advised of the possibility of such damages.

Privacy Officer

Please contact the Voices For Freedom Privacy Officer if you have any concerns about the use of your personal information:

Mandatory reporting of notifiable privacy breaches

If your personal information is involved in a privacy breach which we reasonably believe has caused or is likely to cause serious harm to you (“a Notifiable Privacy Breach”), we will inform you and recommend what steps you should take in response. We will also report a Notifiable Privacy Breach to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner.

Legal Disclaimer

Site content

The material in this site may include technical inaccuracies or typographical errors. Voices For Freedom may make changes or improvements at any time.

Information on the Voices For Freedom website, or those of any of its related, affiliated, or subsidiary units, is provided with the understanding that Voices For Freedom is not rendering professional advice or recommendations. You should not rely on any information on these pages to replace consultations with qualified professionals to meet your individual needs.

General

We accept no liability for any failure to comply with the terms and conditions presented in this website where such failure is due to circumstances beyond our reasonable control. If we waive any rights available to us under these terms and conditions on one occasion, this does not mean that those rights will automatically be waived on any other occasions. If any of these terms and conditions are held to be invalid, unenforceable, or illegal for any reason, the remaining terms and conditions shall nevertheless continue in full force.

Security of Information

No data transmission over the internet can be guaranteed as totally secure. While we strive to protect such information, we do not warrant and cannot ensure the security of any information which you may transmit to us. Accordingly, any information which you transmit to us is transmitted at your own risk. Nevertheless, once we receive your transmission, we will take reasonable steps to preserve the security of such information.