Privacy policy

Data and Privacy Policy
This site is owned and operated by Climate Positive Ltd. Your privacy on the Internet is of the utmost importance to us. At Climate Positive, we want to make your experience online safe, secure and satisfactory. We respect your right to privacy protection under the National Privacy Principles in regulating how we collect, use and disclose and hold your personal information.

We gather certain types of information about our users which are set out below. While we limit the collection of such information to that which is necessary for our functions and activities, we believe you should fully understand how our Privacy Policy regulates the capture and use of that information.

This Privacy Policy applies to information gathered by Climate Positive Ltd. It discloses what information we gather and how we use it. If you do not wish to have your personal information used on the terms of this Privacy Policy, you can utilise our opt-out options set out below or contact our Privacy Officer. Please note that if you do not provide us with personal information we may not be able to provide you with some or all of our services.

Information Climate Positive gathers and tracks
Climate Positive gathers two types of information about users:

• Information that users provide through optional, voluntary submissions. These are voluntary submissions to register, offset emissions or save your calculations, receive our electronic newsletters, create a profile, participate in our campaigns or forums, to email a friend and from participation in polls and surveys.
• Information Climate Positive gathers through aggregated tracking information derived mainly by tallying page views throughout our sites. This information allows us to better tailor our content to readers' needs and to help our members and sponsors better understand the demographics of our audience. Because Climate Positive derives its revenue mainly from individual members, business clients and supporters, providing such aggregated demographic data is essential to keeping our service relevant and up-to-date. Under no circumstances does Climate Positive divulge any information about an individual user to a third party.

Climate Positive will not collect other forms of personal information, including sensitive information, without your prior consent. We do not adopt, use or disclose Commonwealth identifiers to identify personal information that we have collected from you.

We offer the following free services, which require some type of voluntary submission of personal information by users:

1. Electronic newsletters policy (Dispatches)
We will offer a free electronic newsletter to users. Climate Positive gathers the email addresses of users who voluntarily subscribe. Users may remove themselves from this mailing list by following the link provided in every newsletter that points users to the subscription management page. Users can also subscribe to the newsletters at the time of registration.

2. Member Profiles/campaigns policy
Users of the site's membership and campaign pages must register separately for these services in order to post or send messages, although they needn't register to visit the site. During registration the user is required to supply a username, password and email address. Members may have the option to publish a personal profile on the Climate Positive site and have their name displayed. By choosing to have your name displayed, other users of the website can view your name, your offset and your offset amount. This is a voluntary act, and profiles and display names can be removed at any time by logging into the Climate Positive site, or by the administrator on request from a individual member.

3. "E-mail this to a friend" policy
Our site users can choose to electronically forward a link, page, or documents to someone else by clicking "e-mail this to a friend". The user must provide their email address, as well as that of the recipient. This information is used only in the case of transmission errors and, of course, to let the recipient know who sent the email. The information is not used for any other purpose.

4. Registration
In order to offset your footprint using our calculator, you may need to provide certain information including your name, email address and geographical location. This information is used only to help calculate your greenhouse gas emissions profile, process payment information and to send email newsletters. Once you have registered, any information you have entered into the Climate Positive carbon calculator will be available only to the individual member, after entering a username and password.

5. Carbon Calculator, surveys, campaigns and polls
Climate Positive offers the carbon calculator as a free tool to aid individuals and businesses to calculate their greenhouse gas emissions. Information entered into this calculator is only stored if the user voluntarily registers as a member. Climate Positive may occasionally conduct user surveys to better target our content to our audience. We sometimes share the aggregated demographic information in these surveys with our sponsors, advertisers and partners. We never share any of this information about specific individuals with any third party. We may offer interactive polls to users so they can easily share their opinions with other users and see what our audience thinks about important issues. Opinions or other responses to polls are aggregated and are not identifiable to any particular user. Climate Positive may use a system to "tag" users after they have voted, so they can vote only once on a particular question. This tag is not correlated with information about individual users.

Children
We will never knowingly request personally identifiable information from anyone under the age of 13 without requesting parental consent.

Usage tracking
Climate Positive tracks user traffic patterns throughout all of our sites. However, we do not correlate this information with data about individual users. Climate Positive does break down overall usage statistics according to a user's domain name, browser type, and MIME type by reading this information from the browser string (information contained in every user's browser).

Climate Positive sometimes tracks and catalogs the search terms that users enter in our Search function, but this tracking is never associated with individual users. We use tracking information to determine which areas of our sites users like and don't like based on traffic to those areas. We do not track what individual users read, but rather how well each page performs overall. This helps us continue to build a better service for you.

Cookies
We may place a text file called a "cookie" in the browser files of your computer. The cookie itself does not contain Personal Information although it will enable us to relate your use of this site to information that you have specifically and knowingly provided. But the only personal information a cookie can contain is information you supply yourself. A cookie can't read data off your hard disk or read cookie files created by other sites. Climate Positive uses cookies to track user traffic patterns (as described above). Our advertising system delivers a one-time cookie to better track ad impressions and click rates.

You can refuse cookies by turning them off in your browser. If you've set your browser to warn you before accepting cookies, you will receive the warning message with each cookie. You do not need to have cookies turned on to use this site. However, you do need cookies to participate actively in message boards, forums, polling and surveys.

Privacy Policy Use
USE OF INFORMATION
We will always endeavour to limit our use of your personal information to its primary purpose of collection. Any other uses will be subject to your consent or within the framework outlined in the National Privacy Principles.
Climate Positive uses any information voluntarily given by our users to enhance their experience in our network of sites, whether to provide interactive or personalised elements on the sites or to better prepare future content based on the interests of our users.

As stated above, we use information that users voluntarily provide in order to send out electronic newsletters and to enable users to participate in polls, surveys, member profiles and forums. We send out newsletters to subscribers on a regular schedule (depending on the newsletter), and occasionally send out special editions when we think subscribers might be particularly interested in something we are doing. Climate Positive never shares newsletter mailing lists with any third parties, including advertisers, sponsors or partners.

When we use tracking information it is to determine which areas of our sites users like and don't like based on traffic to those areas. We do not track what individual users read, but rather how well each page performs overall. This helps us continue to build a better service for you. We track search terms entered in Search function as one of many measures of what interests our users. But we don't track which terms a particular user enters.

SHARING OF THE INFORMATION
Climate Positive uses the above-described information to tailor our content to suit your needs and help users better understand our audience's demographics. This is essential to keeping our service free. While our employees or subcontractors may view and have access to your personal information, we will not otherwise share or sell information about individual users with or to any third party (including third parties overseas), except to comply with applicable law or valid legal process, to protect the personal safety of our users or the public, with your consent or otherwise in accordance with the National Privacy Principles.

SECURITY AND STORAGE
The security of your personal information is important to us. We may store your personal information in both hard copy and on computer. Hard copy information is kept securely at our premises. Climate Positive operates secure data networks protected by industry standard firewall and password protection systems. Our security and privacy policies are periodically reviewed and enhanced as necessary and only authorised individuals have access to the information provided by our customers. Where we no longer require your personal information, we may destroy or delete such information from time to time. Where you are provided with a user name and password, it is important that you use your best endeavours to keep your user name and password secure.

OPT-OUT POLICY
We give users options wherever necessary and practical. Such choices include:

• Opting not to register to receive our electronic newsletters.
• Opting not to participate in certain interactive areas, which completely alleviates the need to gather any personally identifiable information from our users

YOUR CONSENT
By using this site, you consent to the collection and use of this information by Climate Positive on the terms of this Privacy Policy. If you wish to revoke such consent at any time, you may do so by contacting our Privacy Officer.

ACCURACY OF INFORMATION
We will use our best endeavours to ensure that all personal information collected by us is accurate, complete and up-to-date. If at any time you believe that any of your personal information that we store is not accurate or is out of date, please let us know by contacting our Privacy Officer. If you do not provide us with accurate or complete information, we may not be able to provide you with the free services outlined below.

ACCESSING YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION
You may access your personal information by contacting our Privacy Officer. We will use our best efforts to take less than 30 days to respond to your request. We may also charge you a reasonable fee for providing access to your personal information. If we do withhold your personal information, we will provide you with written reasons. Where we do withhold your personal information, we may instead choose to give you a summary of that information or consider whether the provision of access to an independent third party will meet both of our needs.

Where necessary, we may withhold access to your personal information in certain scenarios which are set out in the National Privacy Principles, available at www.privacy.gov.au.

MODIFICATIONS TO OUR PRIVACY POLICY
We may change our Privacy Policy from time to time at our sole discretion. If we decide to change our Privacy Policy, we will post those changes on this page so that you are always aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances we disclose it.

WHO TO CONTACT
If you have any queries with respect to this Privacy Policy, please telephone our Privacy Officer on 03 9698 5700 or email info@climatepositive.org. Further contact information, including our mailing address, is available on our contacts page.

ADDITIONAL PRIVACY INFORMATION
If you are interested in obtaining additional information on privacy you can visit the Australian Federal Privacy Commissioner's website.