Privacy Policy – Have Your Say

November 2021 update

This site is owned and operated by Bayside City Council using software licensed from Harvest Digital Planning (Harvest). For details on how Bayside City Council collects, protects, discloses, stores and uses your personal information, refer to their Information Privacy Policy below. For details of how Harvest may access personal information, please refer to Harvest’s Privacy Policy.

We are committed to maintaining a culture that respects each individual’s right to privacy.

We are committed to your privacy through the disclosure of methods of information gathering, storage and dissemination.

We comply with all obligations under the provisions of the Victorian Privacy and Data Protection Act 2014.

The Information Privacy Act and the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs) set out the core requirements for the protection of personal information in Australia. Please read the Information Privacy Policy below contact us via the details at the end of this page if you have any questions.

What information is collected?

Joining Bayside Have Your Say

To participate in some online engagement activities, we may require you to join and log in to the site. This helps us understand and report on the demographic representation of those participating in activities. It can also allow us to limit individuals to a single response for a project.

Information collection and use

Bayside City Council is the sole owner of the information collected within the Bayside Have Your Say website. We will not sell, share, or rent this information to others in ways other than what is disclosed in this statement.

Bayside City Council may collect a range of personal information from you when you use our Have Your Say website. Personal information will be collected in a range of ways including through a registration process or through various activities and interactions on the site.

The type of personal information collected will vary and may include (but may not be limited to) the following types of information, when this information is shared, such as via logging in to Have Your Say:

• Your name
• Email address
• Username
• Profile picture
• Phone number
• Your IP address
• User-agent string (browsers)
• Other unique ID numbers
• Social network account IDs
• Physical address, postcode, or other locational attributes
• Demographic information such as age, gender, etc.
• Information about your preferences
• Your recorded thoughts, ideas, opinions, etc. as expressed by you. This may include sensitive information if you provide political opinions.

By submitting your personal information, you consent to Bayside City Council using it to:

• complete an activity that you have chosen to undertake;
• administer Council’s relationship with you;
• monitor online activity on the Have Your Say website;
• improve and add to Council’s services (including online); or
• where required or authorised by law
• detect and rectify fraud or other behaviour that violates terms of use
• send updates and information where you have consented or would reasonably expect to receive them
• respond to your enquiries
• request your feedback
• conduct de-identified research and analytics

If you make a submission to engagement through Bayside Have Your Say while logged in it will be associated with your profile. Only Bayside City Council employees who need the information to perform a specific task (for example, analysing data or answering a query) are granted access to personally identifiable information and responses.

Certain tools on Bayside Have Your Say may share your submission and username publicly. At no time will personal information such as email addresses be shared without your specific approval.

For all projects, except when required by legislative requirements, there will be alternate or anonymous methods of participation that do not require use of the Have Your Say Website or provision of person information. Please contact the relevant project lead or [email protected] to discuss these options.

Bayside City Council have contracted the supply of digital community engagement software from Harvest Digital Planning. Harvest is granted access to data only in order to perform necessary maintenance to the software. Harvest Digital Planning’s contract with the Council is subject to the Australian Privacy Act 1988, Australian Privacy Principles and the Victorian Privacy and Data Protection Act 2014. For details of how Harvest may access personal information, please refer to Harvest’s Privacy Policy.

How do I access, change or delete my personal information?

Change or update personal details

We encourage you to keep your details current. You can update your details when you log on and edit your account details and settings through the ‘My profile’ menu on Have Your Say, or you can update your details or delete your account by contacting us directly at [email protected]

Within the profile Edit/View screen there are a number of additional information fields provided by Harvest Digital Planning, however Bayside does not actively seek or use these details.

You may also request a copy of, changes to, or deletion of, the personal information we hold, and we will act on this request within a reasonable period of time unless we are legally permitted to refuse to do so, in which case we will provide you with details of our refusal in writing. Bayside City Council will endeavour to respond to your request or inquiry within 10 working days.

Notifications

If you wish to receive updates on projects you will need to log in to ‘follow’ projects or provide your email address to subscribe to email updates. You can opt out of these notifications at any time through contacting [email protected]; updating your profile settings or clicking ‘unsubscribe’ at the base of notification emails.

We may send website announcements to registered members, which contain important information about the opening of a major engagement project, change to the website or our services.

How do we protect your information?

Security

This website takes every precaution to protect our users’ information. When users submit sensitive information via the website, your information is protected both online and off-line. Access to sensitive user information, is restricted in Bayside City Council offices. Only Bayside City Council employees who need the information to perform a specific task (for example, answering a query) are granted access to personally identifiable information.

Data retention

We will only retain your personal information for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements.

To determine the appropriate retention period for personal information, we consider the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the personal information, the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal information, the purposes for which we process your personal information, whether we can achieve those purposes through other means and the applicable legal requirements.

In some circumstances you can ask us to delete your data – change or update personal details. Please contact us using the contact detail below.

In some circumstances we may anonymise your personal information (so that it can no longer be associated with you) for analytics, research or statistical purposes in which case we may use this anonymised information indefinitely without further notice to you.

Cookies

A cookie is a piece of data stored on the user’s hard drive containing information about the user.

When you use the Bayside Have Your Say website we may obtain information using technologies such as cookies, tags, web beacons, and navigational data collection (log files, server logs, and clickstream data). For example, we may collect information like the date, time and duration of visits and which webpages are accessed.

This information is generally not linked to your identity, except where it is accessed via links in notifications or where you have identified yourself.

Links

This website contains links to external websites. Bayside City Council is not responsible for the privacy practices of other linked websites. When you leave the Bayside City Council website it is important to read the Privacy Statements of other websites where you submit personally identifiable information. The Bayside City Council Privacy Statement applies solely to information collected by the Bayside City Council website.

Log files

IP addresses are recorded to analyse trends, administer the website, track user’s movement, and gather broad demographic information for aggregate use.

Your IP address is captured to help us understand our participants as well as identify possible misuse of engagement tools.Each entry or response to an engagement activity has the IP address recorded against it.

Copyright

Copyright of materials on Bayside City Council’s Have Your Say website is owned by or licensed to Bayside City Council. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the copyright legislation, no part may be reproduced or reused for any commercial purposes whatsoever.

How do I make a complaint?

If you wish to make a complaint, please contact us using the details in the contact section below and provide us with full details of the complaint. We will promptly investigate your complaint and respond to you, in writing, setting out the outcome of our investigation and the steps we will take in response to your complaint. If you are not satisfied with our response you also have the right to contact the OVIC – Office of the Victorian Information Commissioner.

Changes to this Policy

We reserve the right to modify this policy from time to time, at our sole discretion. If we make a material change to the Privacy Policy we will notify you and the modified policy shall be effective once we notify you of the change. If we do not make any material amendments then we will post the modified policy on our website and it shall be effective once posted. We recommend that you regularly check our website to make sure you are aware of our most up-to-date policy.

Contact us

For more information on the Bayside City Council Information Privacy Policy, contact the Manager Governance:

Bayside City Council
PO Box 27
Sandringham VIC 3191
Phone (03) 9599 4444
Email [email protected]

For more information on the Have Your Say website and Council’s Community Engagement Coordinator:

Bayside City Council
PO Box 27
Sandringham VIC 3191

Phone (03) 9599 4444
Email [email protected]