Privacy Policy

Effective as of June 01, 2022.

This privacy policy describes how Connect Hopes processes, collects, uses and shares personal data when using this website https://www.connecthopes.com.au (the “website”). Please peruse the information carefully to understand our practices regarding your personal data and how we will process them.

All references to ‘us,’ ‘we,’ and ‘our’ in this Privacy Policy are references to Connect Hopes.
All references to ‘you’ and ‘your’ in this Privacy Policy are references to:

(a) Support Workers, NDIS providers and other service providers for disability/medical services and employees of medical clinics, hospitals or other healthcare providers who are customers, or potential customers, of our products and services (Providers);

(b) the participants or service recipients who themselves, or a person who has authority on behalf of the patient use our Platform, and any other individuals who use our Platform or website to connect with a provider (Participants); and

(c) our contractors and suppliers, potential employees, and any other individuals we might deal with in the course of running our business or providing our services.

We are committed to protecting your privacy and ensuring that the ways in which we deal with your personal information comply with the Australian Privacy Principles contained in the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) (Privacy Act) and any other applicable health records legislation.

We may update this Privacy Policy periodically and without notice to you. You should review this Privacy Policy from time to time to review any changes. If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, please contact us using our contact details in section 10 below.

The types of personal information we collect

What is personal data?

We collect information about you in various forms, including personal data. As used in this Policy, “personal information” is as defined in the General Data Protection Regulation; this includes any information which, either alone or in combination with other information we process about you, identifies you as an individual, including, for example, your name, postal address, email address and telephone number.

Why do we need your personal information?

We will only process your personal information in accordance with applicable data protection and privacy laws. We need certain personal information in order to provide you with access to the website. If you registered with us, you would have been asked to tick to agree to provide this information in order to access our services, purchase our products, or view our content. This consent provides us with the legal basis we require under applicable law to process your information. You maintain the right to withdraw such consent at any time. Please do not use our website if you do not agree to our use of your personal information in line with this Policy.

Why do we collect personal information?

To provide our services and run our business, we need to collect personal information, being information or an opinion about an individual reasonably capable of identifying that individual (which might also include their health or other sensitive information) (Personal Information).

We may collect and hold your Personal Information for a range of reasons, such as to allow us to identify who an individual is before they access or use the Platform, to facilitate communications between Participants and their Providers, or to communicate or transact with individuals in the ordinary course of business.

Collecting Your Personal Information

We collect information about you in the following ways: Information You Give Us. This includes:

• the personal information you provide when you register to use our website, including your name, date of birth, postal address, email address, telephone number, username, password and demographic information;
• health and disability-related information or other information which falls within the scope of ‘health information as that term is defined in the Privacy Act;
• Other ‘sensitive information as that term is defined in the Privacy Act (excluding health information, addressed above), such as information which may relate among other things, your racial or ethnic origin, sexual orientation, criminal record or religious or philosophical beliefs;
• the personal information that may be contained in any video, comment or other submission you upload or post to the website;
• the personal information you provide when you report a problem with our website or when we provide you with customer support;
• the personal information you provide when you make a purchase thorough our website such as bank or credit card details used to transact with us or other financial information that allows us to transact with you or provide you with our services. These will be held by a secure payment provider to ensure they are kept safe. We don’t see your full credit card number, nor do we store it;
• the personal information you provide when you correspond with us by phone, email or otherwise; and
• information we may collect from you as a provider, such as your professional qualifications or skills, details of your employment or business history (including details of any personal or professional references and reviews provided to us by third parties);

Information from Social Networking Websites.

Our website includes interfaces that allow you to connect with social networking sites (each a “SNS”). If you link to a SNS through our website, you authorize us to access, use and store the information you agreed the SNS could provide based on your settings on that SNS. We will access, use and store that information in accordance with this Policy. You can revoke our access to the information you provide in this way at any time by amending the appropriate settings from within your account settings on the applicable SNS.

Information Automatically Collected.

When you access our website, we automatically log information about you and your computer or mobile device. For example, when visiting our website, we log your computer or mobile device operating system name and version, manufacturer and model, browser type, browser language, screen resolution, the website you visited before browsing our website, pages you viewed, how long you spent on a page, access times and information about your use of and actions on our website. We collect this information about you using cookies.

Automated Decision Making and Profiling.

We do not use your personal data for the purposes of automated decision-making. However, we may do so in order to fulfil obligations imposed by law, in which case we will inform you of any such processing and provide you with an opportunity to object.

Cookies

What are cookies?

We may collect information using “cookies.” Cookies are small data files stored on the hard drive of your computer or mobile device by a website. We may use both session cookies (which expire once you close your web browser) and persistent cookies (which stay on your computer or mobile device until you delete them) to provide a more personal and interactive experience on our website.

We use two broad categories of cookies: (1) first-party cookies, served directly by us to your computer or mobile device, which are used only by us to recognize your computer or mobile device when it revisits our website; and (2) third party cookies, which are served by service providers on our website, and can be used by such service providers to recognize your computer or mobile device when it visits other websites.

Cookies we use

Our website uses the following types of cookies for the purposes set out below:

Type of cookie	Purpose
Essential Cookies	These cookies are essential to provide you with services available through our website and to enable you to use some of its features. For example, they allow you to log in to secure areas of our website and help the content of the pages you request load quickly. Without these cookies, the services that you have asked for cannot be provided, and we only use these cookies to provide you with those services.
Functionality Cookies	These cookies allow our website to remember choices you make when you use our website, such as your language preferences, your login details and the changes you make to other parts of our website, which you can customize. The purpose of these cookies is to provide you with a more personal experience and to avoid you having to re-enter your preferences every time you visit our website.
Analytics and Performance Cookies	These cookies are used to collect information about traffic to our website and how users use our website. The information gathered does not identify any individual visitor. It includes the number of visitors to our website. These websites referred them to our website, the pages they visited on our website, what time of day they visited it, whether they have visited our website before, and other similar information. We use this information to help operate our website more efficiently, gather broad demographic information and monitor the activity level on our website. We use Google Analytics for this purpose. Google Analytics uses its own cookies. It is only used to improve how our website works. You can find out more information about Google Analytics cookies here: https://developers.google.com/analytics/resources/concepts/gaConceptsCookies You can find out more about how Google protects your data here: https://policies.google.com/privacy. You can prevent the use of Google Analytics relating to your use of our website by downloading and installing the browser plugin available via this link: http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout?hl=en-GB
Targeted and advertising cookies	These cookies track your browsing habits to enable us to show advertising more likely to interest you. These cookies use information about your browsing history to group you with other users who have similar interests. Based on that information, and with our permission, third-party advertisers can place cookies to enable them to show adverts which we think will be relevant to your interests while you are on third-party websites.
Social Media Cookies	These cookies are used when you share information using a social media sharing button or “like” button on our website. You link your account or engage with our content on or through a social networking website such as Facebook, Twitter or Google+. The social network will record that you have done this.

Disabling cookies

You can typically remove or reject cookies via your browser settings. To do this, follow the instructions provided by your browser (usually located within the “settings,” “help,” “tools,” or “edit” facility). Many browsers are set to accept cookies until you change your settings.

If you do not accept our cookies, you may experience some inconvenience using our website. For example, we may not be able to recognize your computer or mobile device, and you may need to log in every time you visit our website.

Advertising

We may use other companies to serve third-party advertisements when you visit and use the website. These companies may collect and use click stream information, browser type, time and date, and the subject of advertisements clicked or scrolled over during your visits to the website and other websites to provide advertisements about goods and services likely to be of interest to you. These companies typically use tracking technologies to collect this information. Differentcompanies’ tracking technologies are subject to their own privacy policies.

Using Your Personal Information

We may use your personal information as follows:

• to operate, maintain, and improve our website, products, and services;
• to manage your account, including communicating with you regarding your account if you have an account on our website;
• to operate and administer promotions you participate in on our website;
• to respond to your comments and questions and to provide customer service;
• to send information, including technical notices, updates, security alerts, and support and administrative messages;
• with your consent, to send you marketing e-mails about upcoming promotions and other news, including information about products and services offered by us and our affiliates. You may opt-out of receiving such information at any time: such marketing emails tell you how to “opt-out.” Please note that even if you opt out of receiving marketing emails, we may still send you non-marketing emails. Non-marketing emails include emails about your account with us (if you have one) and our business dealings with you;
• to process payments you make via our website;
• as we believe necessary or appropriate (a) to comply with applicable laws; (b) to comply with lawful requests and legal processes, including to respond to requests from public and government authorities; (c) to enforce our Policy; and (d) to protect our rights, privacy, safety or property, and/or that of you or others;
• for analysis and study services; and
• as described in the “Sharing of your Personal Data” section below.

Sharing Your Personal Data

We may share your personal data as follows:

• Third Parties Designated by You. We may share your personal data with third parties where you have provided your consent to do so, including;
• Providers that you book via our platform, previously booked or intend to book an appointment with; and
• Our service providers who support and enable us to provide our services and run our business, such as;
• Our Information technology, network, software and cloud storage providers;
• Any management software providers which your provider uses; and
• Our payment providers ensure that your financial information is kept safe; and
• Our external professional advisers (such as legal advisors); and

• Our Third-Party Service Providers. We may share your personal data with our third-party service providers. They provide services such as data analysis, payment processing, accounts and adminstration, information technology and related infrastructure provision, customer service, email delivery, auditing and other similar services.

• Third Party Sites. Our website may contain links to third-party websites and features. This Policy does not cover the privacy practices of such third parties. These third parties have their own privacy policies, and we do not accept any responsibility or liability for their websites, features or policies. Please read their privacy policies before you submit any data to them.
  
  We will never sell or exploit your personal information or share it for any purposes which are unrelated to providing and operating our platform as described in both the terms of use and this privacy policy.
  
  We will use your personal information (including your health and other sensitive information) for the primary purpose for which we collected it (for example, to contact you to confirm an appointment booking, to provide details of that booking to your service provider, or to facilitate payments related to your transactions with us.

User Generated Content

You may share personal data with us when you submit user-generated content to our website, including via our forums, message boards and Websites on our website. Please note that any information you post or disclose on our website will become public information and will be available to other users and the general public. We urge you to be careful when disclosing your personal data, or any additional information, on our website. Personal data and other information will not be private or confidential once published on our website.

We may use and disclose such feedback on our website if you provide feedback to us, provided we do not associate such feedback with your personal data. If you have provided your consent to do so, we may post your first and last name along with your feedback on our website. We will collect any information in such feedback and treat the personal data in accordance with this Policy.

International Data Transfer

Your information, including personal data that we collect from you, may be transferred to, stored at and processed by us outside the country where you reside, where data protection and privacy regulations may not offer the same level of protection as in other parts of the world. By accepting this Policy, you agree to this transfer, storing or processing. We will take all steps reasonably necessary to ensure that your data is treated securely and in accordance with this Policy.

Security

We seek to use reasonable organizational, technical and administrative measures to protect personal data within our organization. Unfortunately, no transmission or storage system can be guaranteed to be completely secure, and the transmission of information via the Internet is not completely secure. If you have reason to believe that your interaction with us is no longer secure (for example, if you feel that the security of any account you might have with us has been compromised), please immediately notify us of the problem by contacting us.

Retention

We will only retain your personal data as long as reasonably required for you to use the website until you close your account/cancel your subscription unless a more extended retention period is required or permitted by law (for example, for regulatory purposes). The personal information may still be available in our service provider servers even if they have been deleted in our systems, and we may not have control over the same.

How to access, correct or update your personal information

Under the Australian Privacy Principles, you have the right to request access to or correct the Personal Information that we hold about you.If you would like to make a request to access, or correct, your Personal Information, which we have, you can:

(a) if you are a user of the Platform, update some of your Personal Information from within your Platform account or profile; or

(b) otherwise, contact us using the details provided in our website contact us section.

Suppose you cannot update or correct your Personal Information via the Platform. In that case, we will take reasonable steps to correct any errors in the Personal Information we hold about you within 14 days of receiving written notice from you about those errors or to provide you with access to the Personal Information we hold within 30 days of a written request.We may charge you a reasonable fee for our costs incurred in meeting any of your requests to access or correct the Personal Information we hold about you.If we deny you access to or refuse your request to correct your Personal Information, we will provide you with our reasons for this.

Our Policy on Children

Our website is/are not directed to children under 18. If a parent or guardian becomes aware that his or her child has provided us with information without their consent, he or she should contact us. We will delete such information from our files as soon as reasonably practicable.

Your Rights

• Opt-out. You may contact us anytime to opt out of: (i) direct marketing communications; (ii) automated decision-making and/or profiling; (iii) our collection of sensitive personal data; (iv) any new processing of your personal data that we may carry out beyond the original purpose; or (v) the transfer of your personal data outside the EEA. Please note that using some of the website may be ineffective upon opt-out.
• Access You may access the information we hold about you at any time via your profile/account or by contacting us directly.
• Amend You can also contact us to update or correct any inaccuracies in your personal data.
• Move Your personal data is portable – i.e. you have the flexibility to move your data to other service providers as you wish.
• Erase and forget In certain situations, for example, when the information we hold about you is no longer relevant or is incorrect, you can request that we erase your data.

If you wish to exercise any of these rights, please get in touch with us. In your request, please make clear: (i) what personal data is concerned; and (ii) which of the above rights you would like to enforce. For your protection, we may only implement requests concerning the personal data associated with the email address you use to send us your request. We may need to verify your identity before implementing your request. We will try to comply with your request as soon as reasonably practicable and, in any event, within one month of your request. Please note that we may need to retain certain information for recordkeeping purposes and/or to complete any transactions you began prior to requesting such change or deletion.

Complaints

We are committed to resolving any complaints about our collection or use of your personal data. If you would like to make a complaint regarding this Policy or our practice regarding your personal data, please get in touch with us through the information listed on our website. We will reply to your complaint as soon as possible and, in any event, within 30 days. We hope to resolve any complaint brought to our attention; however, if you feel that your complaint has not been adequately resolved, you reserve the right to contact your local data protection supervisory authority.

Contact Information

We welcome your comments or questions about this Policy. You may contact us in writing or through our website.