Privacy Policy

1. Last updated September 2023

This Privacy Policy specifically applies to Education Services Australia Ltd's service, domainname.edu.au.

Education Services Australia Limited (ESA) (ABN 18 0073 424 21) on behalf of its service, domainname.edu.au (ESA, we, us or our) is committed to protecting the privacy of personal information. This privacy policy explains how ESA collects and uses your Personal Information for domainname.edu.au and the rights and options you have in this respect. In doing so ESA complies with its obligations to protect the privacy of Personal Information under the Australian Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) (Privacy Act).

ESA delivers a number of products and services in relation to education systems and sectors (related entities). This Privacy Policy applies to the use of your Personal Information by domainname.edu.au and ESA's related entities. Those related entities may also have their privacy policies which set out additional detail or differences in their privacy practices. To the extent that those privacy policies are inconsistent with this Privacy Policy, those privacy policies will prevail over this Privacy Policy in relation to the actions of those related entities. A reference in this Privacy Policy to ESA, we, us or our is also a reference to domainname.edu.au and those related entities.

In this privacy policy, 'you' or 'your' refers to the individual reading this privacy policy or those people whose Personal Information ESA collects, uses and discloses in accordance with this privacy policy.

The general Privacy Policy for ESA is available here.

2. Personal Information

"Personal Information" is information or an opinion, whether true or not, and whether recorded in a material form or not, about an identified individual or an individual who is reasonably identifiable.

3. What Personal Information do we collect and hold?

The types of Personal Information we may collect about an individual will depend upon the nature of our interaction with them.

Personal Information that we collect may include (but is not limited to) the following:

• name
• age and/or date of birth
• contact details including telephone numbers (landline and/or mobile)
• current address (including postal address)
• email address
• gender
• identification information such as driving licence details, including driving licence number
• payment details, such as your credit card or bank account details, and
• Australian Business Number (ABN).

We collect and record Personal Information about individuals such as:

• our customers, potential customers and their representatives - e.g. individuals who we register domain names for or who seek further information about this service
• our suppliers and potential suppliers and their representatives - e.g. third party service providers who assist us to carry out our domain registration services as well as website hosts, marketing service providers etc., and
• any other person who comes into contact with us.

4. How and when do we collect Personal Information?

We collect your Personal Information to allow us to conduct our business functions, to provide, market and sell our products and services and for the specified purposes set out in paragraph 6. In some circumstances the collection of Personal Information may be required by law.

We may collect your Personal Information in the course of providing you with goods or services, or:

• when you apply or register for a domain
• when you provide us, or you offer or apply to supply us, with goods or services
• when you provide information to us in any way (including by completing a form, disclosing information over the phone or via email, or providing us a business card)
• when you request information about us, our products or our services
• when you provide feedback to us
• when you visit or fill in a form on our Website or send us an email (see below for further information), and
• where we are otherwise required or authorised by law to do so.

Collection via emails and electronic forms

The information collected by ESA when you send ESA an email will include your email address and may also include some of your personal information. In all cases and at all times, this personal information will only be used for the stated purpose for which it was provided.

ESA records your email address and personal information in the following cases:

• when you apply for a domain name through the edu.au registrar services provided by ESA
• when you update your account details via the console and otherwise manage your account
• when you subscribe to any ESA publications
• when you use @esa.edu.au email addresses to contact ESA
• when you register to attend an ESA event

Remaining anonymous or using a pseudonym: are you required to provide Personal Information?

Where it is not impractical or unlawful, you may interact with ESA without identifying yourself or using a pseudonym. As a general principle, you provide ESA with your Personal Information voluntarily and there are generally no detrimental effects for you if you choose not to consent or to provide Personal Information. However, there are circumstances in which ESA cannot take action without certain Personal Information. For example, Personal Information may be required to provide you with a domain name and assist you with registration of this and well as access to specific web offerings and newsletters. In these cases, it will not be possible for ESA to provide you with what you request without the relevant Personal Information and ESA will notify you accordingly.

5. Information collected via our Website

Personal Information may be collected by us and by our third party service providers who assist us in operating our website at domainname.edu.au (the Website).

We may use various technological methods from time to time to track the visiting patterns of individuals accessing our Website, including but not limited to the methods set out in this paragraph 5.

Click Stream Data

When you read, browse or download information from our Website, we or our internet service provider may also collect information such as the date, time and duration of a visit, the pages accessed, the IP address of your computer, and any information downloaded. This information may be used for purposes including statistical, reporting and website administration, maintenance and improvement purposes.

Cookies

Our Website may use 'cookies' from time to time. Cookies are small text files that are transferred to a user's computer hard drive by a website for the purpose of storing information about a user's identity, browser type or website visiting patterns. Cookies may be used on our Website to monitor web traffic, for example the time of visit, pages visited and some system information about the type of computer being used. We use this information to enhance the content and services offered on our Website.

Cookies are sometimes also used to collect information about what pages you visit and the type of software you are using. If you access our Website or click-through to our Website from a link in an email we send you, a cookie may be downloaded onto your computer's hard drive.

Cookies may also be used for other purposes on our Website.

Google Analytics

We use Google Analytics to help analyse how you use our Website. Google Analytics generates statistical and other information about website use by means of cookies, which are stored on users' computers. The information generated is used to create reports about the use of our Website. Google will store this information.

If you do not want your Website visit data reported by Google Analytics, you can install the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on. For more details on installing and uninstalling the add-on, please visit the Google Analytics opt-out page at https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.

6. How do we use your Personal Information?

We use the Personal Information we collect about you for our business functions and activities, in order to operate our business efficiently, and to market our products and services for the benefit of our customers.

We may collect, hold and use your personal information:

• to identify and communicate with you
• to enable us to provide you with requested information, products or services, including to register a domain and the associated processes under the .au Licensing Rules
• to otherwise assist customers by providing them with information and support
• to collect and process payments
• to help us to manage and enhance products or services we provide to you
• to help us to manage and enhance goods and services we procure from our suppliers and subcontractors
• to personalise and customise your experiences on our Website
• to manage and administer any account you may hold with us
• to promote and market our products and services to you
• to provide you with information that we believe may be of interest to you or that you may be interested in receiving, including advertising material, regarding us, our clients, and our business partners
• to conduct research for the purposes of improving existing products or services or creating new products or services
• to help us research the needs of our customers to enable us to market our products and services with a better understanding of your needs and the needs of customers generally
• to protect you and us from fraud
• to help us manage our business operations
• for business support purposes including maintenance, backup and audit
• to respond to any queries or complaints you may have
• to investigate, review, mitigate risks associated with, and inform you of, a data or other security breach involving your personal information, or
• to comply with our statutory and legal obligations.

We may aggregate personal information for reporting, statistical and analysis purposes, and for business, product and service improvement purposes. This allows us to better inform ourselves and anticipate our customers' preferences and requirements, and to monitor and improve the effectiveness of our business, products and services. We may also de-identify information for inclusion in such aggregated databases or reports.

We reserve the right at all times to monitor, review, retain, and/or disclose any information as necessary to satisfy any applicable law, but we have no obligation to monitor the use of the Website or to retain the content of any user session.

You consent to us using your Personal Information in the above ways and as set out in this Privacy Policy.

We may otherwise collect, use or disclose your Personal Information where the collection, use or disclosure is:

• in accordance with this Privacy Policy or any agreement you enter into with us, or
• required or authorised by law, including without limitation the Australian Privacy Principles under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth).

7. When do we disclose your Personal Information?

We may disclose, or provide access to, your Personal Information to third parties in connection with the purposes described in paragraph 6. Depending on the circumstances and the nature of your engagement with us, we may disclose your Personal Information to our related entities, to third parties that provide products and services to us or through us, or to other third parties.

In particular, we disclose registration information that you provide to us in order to facilitate registering your domain name to the Registry Operator, Identity Digital Australia Pty Ltd, and .au Domain Administration Ltd, to maintain complete and accurate registry data of all licences issued in the .au namespace, monitor compliance with their licence terms and conditions, and to assist with and resolve complaints relating to a domain licence.

A subset of the registration information disclosed to and stored in Identity Digital Australia Pty Ltd databases is made publicly available, via the internet, by third parties via a WHOIS service, allowing the public to retrieve information about the licence holder of a domain and their nominated technical and administrative contacts.

ESA has no control over the way in which such third parties may use your Personal Information in this context.

We may also disclose your Personal Information to the .edu.au Advisory Committee (eAC). This may include for the purposes of enabling eAC to consider whether your application for a .edu.au domain name complies with the registration criteria, and also in considering any dispute over your right to register an edu.au domain name. We also prepare summary reports of our dealings with registrants from our electronic management system, and provide copies of these reports to eAC. Such reports may include your Personal Information.

We may also disclose your Personal Information to:

• any of ESA's services, internal divisions, business units or departments
• your nominated representatives
• other organisations or individuals who assist us in providing products and services to you
• professional service providers and advisors who perform functions on our behalf, such as lawyers
• representatives, agents or contractors who are appointed by us in the ordinary operation of our business to assist us in providing goods or services or administering our business (such as for data storage or processing, printing, mailing, marketing, planning and product or service development), and
• Government, regulatory authorities and other organisations as required or authorised by law.

We may also disclose your Personal Information to our Website host or software application providers in certain limited circumstances, for example when our Website experiences a technical problem or to ensure that it operates in an effective and secure manner.

8. Interstate and Overseas disclosures

Some of your Personal Information may be disclosed, transferred, stored, processed or used overseas by us, or by third party service providers. This may happen if:

• our offices or related entities are overseas
• we outsource certain activities overseas
• transactions, information, services or products have an overseas connection, or
• our computer systems including IT servers are located overseas.

You consent to the collection, use, storage, and processing of your Personal Information outside of Australia as set out in this Privacy Policy.

In particular, your Personal Information may be disclosed to third parties in the US, EEA and UK, and such other countries in which those parties or their, or our, computer systems may be located from time to time, where it may be used for the purposes described in this Privacy Policy. Where such parties are located overseas, you may have rights to enforce such parties' compliance with applicable data protection laws, but you might not have recourse against those parties under the Australian Privacy Act in relation to how those parties treat your personal information.

9. Other uses and disclosures

We may collect, use and disclose your Personal Information for other purposes not listed in this Privacy Policy. If we do so, we will make it known to you at the time we collect or use your Personal Information.

10. Marketing

You consent to us using your Personal Information for sending you information, including promotional material and surveys about us or our products and services, as well as the products and services of our related entities and third parties, now and in the future. You also consent to us sending you such information by means of direct mail, email, SMS and MMS messages.

If you do not want to receive marketing information from us, you can unsubscribe in any of the following ways:

• clicking on the 'Unsubscribe' or subscription preferences link in a direct marketing email that you have received from us, or
• contacting us using the contact details specified in paragraph 14.

11. Access to the personal information

If you want to know what, if any, personal information ESA holds about you, or wish to correct any personal information ESA may hold about you, please contact ESA using the contact information at paragraph 14.

12. Security of your personal information

ESA takes reasonable steps to:

• protect Personal Information that it holds against misuse, interference, loss, unauthorised access, modification or disclosure by utilising up-to-date electronic and physical security controls that comply with relevant industry standards and guidelines; and
• destroy or permanently de-identify Personal Information if it is no longer required.

Personal Information may be kept on our Personal Information technology systems, those of our contractors or in paper files.

You should be aware that there are inherent risks associated with the transmission of personal information via the internet. If you do not wish to use the internet to transmit personal information you can contact ESA using the contact information below.

You should also note that if you link to a non-ESA web page, a different privacy and security statement is likely to apply.

13. How we deal with complaints about Privacy

If you feel that we have not respected your privacy or that we have conducted ourselves inconsistently with this Privacy Policy, please contact our Privacy Officer in any of the ways specified in paragraph 14 and advise us as soon as possible. We will investigate your queries and privacy complaints within a reasonable period of time depending on the complexity of the complaint.

It would assist us to respond to your complaint promptly if it is made in writing. Please detail information relevant to your complaint.

We will notify you of the outcome of our investigation.

14. What to do if you have a question, problem or complaint, or want to contact us about our use of your Personal Information or this Privacy Policy

If you have any questions, comments, concerns or complaints about ESA's privacy practices, you can contact ESA by:

• Telephone: +61 3 9207 9600;
• Post: Post Office Box 177, Carlton South, Victoria, Australia 3053; or
• Email: privacy@esa.edu.au

15. Changes to this Privacy Policy

ESA may make changes to this privacy policy from time to time to take account of new laws and technology or changes to ESA's operation and practices. ESA recommends that you regularly check this privacy policy. Any changes will take effect as soon as they are posted on this website. You may obtain a paper copy of this privacy policy by contacting ESA via the contact details provided above.