Privacy

This Privacy Policy sets out how Northline* collects, stores, uses and discloses personal information.

Where required by law, we will provide you privacy information (in the form of a Privacy Notice or other privacy disclosure documentation) specific to the products or services you want to obtain from us or specific to your dealings with us.

What is ‘personal information’?

Personal information is information or an opinion about an identified individual, or an individual who is reasonably identifiable:

• whether the information or opinion is true or not; and
• whether the information or opinion is recorded in a material form or not.

What kinds of personal information do we collect and hold?

The personal information collected and maintained by Northline generally includes your name, date of birth, gender, address, contact details and information specific to the product or service you decide to purchase from us, such as details of any property being insured, or your dealings with the specific Northline business.

For some policies, we also collect and maintain your sensitive information. This includes information about your health, genetics, membership of any trade unions or professional associations and any criminal convictions you may have.

For employment applications, we collect your name, address, contact details, current and past employment information, educational qualifications and professional associations. We also collect information about and proof of your residency status, the name and contact details of your referees and other information required for recruitment purposes. Where we seek your consent to conduct a background check, we also collect details of your proof of identity from you.

In the recruitment process, we may ask you to answer optional questions about your personal attributes such as age, gender, ethnic background and language spoken. This personal (including sensitive) information is collected only for the purpose of understanding the diversity profile of applicants and employees and for internal reporting purposes within NORTHLINE PARTNERSHIP and the NORTHLINE NOMINEECO PTY LTD.

How do we collect your personal information?

Where it is possible, we collect your personal information directly from you in person, in writing, over the telephone, by facsimile, through our online services (including our virtual online assistant and any online chat functions) and/or by electronic messages. In some circumstances, we may also collect it from:

• third parties who you have asked to provide your personal information to us, including your referees and your insurer;
• our agents and service providers;
• law enforcement, dispute resolution, statutory and regulatory bodies;
• marketing organisations, including through the use of purchased lists;
• industry databases;
• publicly available sources such as the Internet and telephone directories; and/or
• the general public when it is unsolicited and may be relevant to a particular policy or fraud investigation.

Unless we are required or permitted by law to collect sensitive information about you, we will only do so by obtaining your consent.

If you decide to complete an online application form, the information that you enter into the online form will only be collected by us if you submit your online application. If at any stage you cancel your application prior to submitting your application, the information you have entered up to that point will be automatically deleted.

Website and other data tracking

We may collect information about your visit to our site to assist us to measure and improve our website. Examples of information that we collect include: day and time of your visit, whether you have visited our website previously, whether you used a search engine to find us and some geographical information about what country and state you are in.

We use Google Analytics to collect visitor information so that we can better understand how to improve our products and services for you. One of the primary methods used by this tool is the placement of cookies. Cookies are small information files that an end user's web browser places on their computer when a website is visited. For information on disabling these cookies, please go to the privacy settings section within your browser. In addition to the session cookie, Google Analytics uses other data collection methods such as appending query strings to an image request. We store the data generated by Google Analytics securely and do not share it with third parties.

We also use third party remarketing cookies e.g. through Google Adwords. These cookies allow us to display tailored advertising to you on different websites across the internet based on your prior visits to our site. We do not collect any identifiable information about you through this remarketing process. You can opt out of Google's use of cookies by visiting Google's Ads settings http://www.google.com/settings/ads.

We also use other external companies for the following purposes:

• for web hosting services for this website; and/or
• to gather non-personal information (using cookies) in order to evaluate the website’s effectiveness, for example online marketing activities.

Email

We retain the content and associated data of any email that you send to us if we believe we have a legal requirement to do so. Your email message content may be monitored by our employees for security issues, including where email abuse is suspected; our response to you may also be monitored for quality assurance issues.

For what purposes do we collect, hold and use your personal information?

We collect, hold and use your personal information for the purposes of providing our products and services and managing our business. This may include:

• marketing our services and products and those of our related companies, brokers, intermediaries and business partners that may interest you;
• conducting customer research and analytics in relation to our service and products, and improving our service and products;
• handling complaints and disputes;
• training our employees, agents and representatives;
• detecting, investigating and preventing fraud;
• identifying and contacting individuals who do business with us; and/or
• assessing and processing employment applications.

Who do we disclose your personal information to and why?

We may disclose your personal information to others for the purposes specified in the section above. This may include disclosure to:

• our related companies;
• our distributors and agents;
• government, law enforcement, dispute resolution, statutory, regulatory or enforcement bodies and agencies;
• other parties as required by law.

We may also disclose your personal information (but not sensitive information) to others we have business arrangements with to enable them to offer their products and services to you.

We will not disclose your sensitive information for any purpose, other than the purpose for which it was collected, or a directly related secondary purpose, unless you otherwise consent.

Disclosure to overseas recipients

In some instances, your personal information may be disclosed to other companies in the Northline Group, business partners and service providers (including providers of our virtual online assistant and any online chat function) that may be located overseas.

We regularly review the security of our systems used for sending personal information overseas. Any information disclosed may only be used for the purposes of collection detailed previously and for system administration.

How do we hold your personal information?

We may hold your personal information in a number of ways, including:

• in our computer systems or databases, which may involve storing data on storage or computer systems provided by third party suppliers;
• in paper records; and/or
• in telephone recordings (used for training and verification purposes).

Where it has been collected from our or your agent, or our service providers, they may also hold copies of your personal information.

We may combine personal information we receive about you with other information we hold about you. This includes information received from third parties and information collected for different products and services.

Links to external sites

We may include links to external sites that we consider contain content relevant to the information that you were seeking from us. Where these links occur, we accept no responsibility for the accuracy of the content, the privacy or security of those sites or your reliance on any information contained within any such site.

Contact us

Access to, and correction of, your personal information

Northline aims to ensure that your personal information is accurate, up to date, complete and relevant. If you would like to seek access to, or revise, your personal information, or feel that the information we currently have on record is incorrect or incomplete, please contact us using the following contact details:

Making a complaint

If you believe that we have not met our privacy obligations in our handling of your personal information, you may lodge a complaint by contacting us on the above contact details, using our online form, or in writing to: Human Resources, Northline Partnership Australia Limited, Level 1, 62 The Parade, Norwood SA 5067  

If you are unhappy with the resolution of your complaint or with the way that Northline has handled your complaint, you may be able to refer the matter to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.

Office of the Australian Information Commissioner

GPO Box 5218
Sydney NSW 2001
1300 363 992
www.oaic.gov.au

Changes to this Privacy Policy

We may make changes to this Privacy Policy from time to time for any reason. We will publish changes to this Privacy Policy on this website.

*Northline means NORTHLINE NOMINEECO PTY LTD in its capacity as agent for NORTHLINE PARTNERSHIP.