Privacy on this website

You can read every page on this site without telling us who you are. There is no account to make. We ask for your details in two places — the contact form and the newsletter — and both times you choose to type them.

We do not record your IP address or which browser you are using, and we do not keep a record of who visited. The site does count how often each page is opened, and how often something is shared, a calendar file taken or a search made (and the words of a search that found nothing, so we can add what people look for), as a total for each day with nothing about who did it; a browser that asks not to be tracked is not counted. If your browser sends Global Privacy Control — the setting some browsers and extensions carry that means do not sell or share my data — no visit counting is loaded at all and nothing is sent. We ask your browser. We never ask you.

What we know about you

If you send us a message, we keep your name, your email address, the subject if you gave one, what you wrote, and the date — so that we can reply, and so that we know which messages have been answered.

If you join the newsletter, we keep your email address, your name if you gave one, the date you joined, and a private token that makes your unsubscribe link work without letting anyone unsubscribe anyone else.

That is the whole list. The one other trace you can leave is accidental: if something on the site breaks while you are reading, we record which page it broke on and what went wrong, so that we can fix it. That record has nothing in it about you.

Who else sees it

Your message is read by the people here who can answer it. Because we work in Karen as well as English, that may include a bilingual worker or an interpreter helping us understand or reply to you.

Like any website, this one is run with the help of outside providers: to host it, to hold what you send, to check that a form is being filled in by a person, to deliver our email, and to count visits. What you write in the contact form passes through our email provider on its way to us. Those providers keep their own technical records of the traffic they carry, as any host does, and some of them operate overseas. If you would like to know which providers we use, ask us and we will tell you.

We do not sell, rent or lend your information to anybody, and we do not pass it to anyone except where it is the thing you asked for.

Please tell us only what you need to

We never ask for health, immigration, cultural or family details on this website, and there is nowhere on the site designed to hold them. But the message box is yours to write in, and whatever you write is stored and emailed.

So please put in a general enquiry only what we need in order to help you. If you do tell us something private, we will treat it carefully and keep it to the people who need to see it in order to respond. If a matter is sensitive, say so and ask for a better way to talk about it — we will give you one.

If you are writing to us about somebody else, please only give us their details if they are happy for you to.

One more thing worth knowing: an email crossing the internet is not a sealed envelope. If a matter is sensitive, tell us briefly and we will arrange a better way to talk.

What you can ask us to do

You can ask us what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. Get in touch and we will do it. We may need to check that you are who you say you are before we hand anything over or change it.

Every newsletter has an unsubscribe link. Using it stops the emails and marks you as unsubscribed — on its own it does not remove your address from our records. If you want it gone as well, ask, and we will delete it.

How long we keep it

We keep messages and subscriptions for as long as they are useful to the work, and nothing is deleted on a timer. If you would rather we did not keep yours, ask us and we will remove it.

If we get it wrong

Please tell us first. We will look into it properly, tell you what we found, and fix what needs fixing — we would much rather hear it from you than have you go away unhappy. If you would rather raise it with somebody outside the organisation, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner takes privacy complaints and publishes advice about making one.

Cookies, and other people’s pages

We set no cookies of our own. Counting visits does: we use Google Analytics, which keeps a small file in your browser so that somebody coming back is not counted as somebody new. One may also be set when a form is checked for spam. Separately, your browser keeps two things that are never sent to us: which announcements you have dismissed, so we do not show you the same one twice, and the last few pages you looked at, so the search box can offer them back. Clearing your site data removes both.

Some pages carry a map or a video. Those are drawn by the company that provides them, so while one is on your screen your browser is talking to them directly, as it would on any site that shows one. Pages here also link out to other organisations' websites. What those companies and sites do with what they see is covered by their own privacy policies, not this one.

If anything here does not match what you have experienced on this site, please tell us — that would be a mistake worth fixing rather than a policy worth defending.