The Hydraulic Services Consultants (Australasia) Ltd. is an organisation that is, by nature, personal information-intensive. We rely on comprehensive and accurate personal information about our members and other people with whom we deal. We collect information from members and non-members so that we can provide you with our services, manage our relationship with you, communicate with you effectively and identify which of our services will best suit your needs. We have systems and procedures in place to protect your privacy whenever we collect, store, or use your personal information.
What kind of personal information do we collect?
Personal information, including sensitive information, that the Hydraulic Services Consultants (Australasia) Ltd. collects and holds includes, but is not limited to:
- Members' official and preferred names, titles, post-nominals, address, telephone, and e-mail contact details (private and business), date of birth.
- Members' qualifications, education and academic history, work experience and skills, occupation, employer information, insurance details, areas of practice, areas of interest.
- Membership information relating to Special Interest Groups.
- Financial details including credit card numbers, bank account information, financial status of membership, and subscriptions to the Hydraulic Services Consultants (Australasia) Ltd. publications.
- Assessment records created when a member applies for a certain membership grade. This can include Curriculum Vitaes (CVs), Engineering Practice Reports (EPRs) Competency Demonstration Reports (CDRs) and Migration Skills Assessments.
- Information required to nominate members for honours and awards.
- Information from persons who participate in the Hydraulic Services Consultants (Australasia) Ltd. sponsored seminars, conferences or other events and programs.
How we collect your personal information
We collect most personal information direct from you, for example, when you fill in an application for admission, readmission, concession or a qualifications assessment. Information may also be collected direct from you when you deal with us personally, over the telephone, send a letter, or visit the web site.
Information is collected from you when you nominate for an award, are invited to the grade of Fellow or Honorary Fellow, or stand for election for a position on the Executive Committee, a Committee or constituent group. Information is also collected from you when you participate in a Hydraulic Services Consultants (Australasia) Ltd. survey.
There may be occasions when a third party provides information about you, such as when you are nominated for an honour or award, or when a complaint is made against you.
We also collect information about members and non-members who register for the Hydraulic Services Consultants (Australasia) Ltd. events, seminars and conferences.
How we use your personal information
We will use your personal information to provide you with a particular product or service and to contact you about matters pertaining to membership of the Hydraulic Services Consultants (Australasia) Ltd. This includes (but is not limited to) the following:
- Assessing membership applications.
- Processing payments of applications.
- Making decisions relating to nomination or election to a position on the Executive Committee or other Committee.
- Providing membership services such as the Hydraulic Services Consultants (Australasia) Ltd. magazine, e-News, and other member benefits.
- Inviting you to partake in events, technical seminars, professional development activities and networking activities.
- Contacting Executive Committee members to distribute business papers.
We may use your personal information for purposes related or ancillary to the main reason we collect it, such as:
- Internal accounting and administration.
- Regulatory reporting and compliance.
- Helping us to identify and inform you about other services that may be of benefit to you
In the event of a complaint against you we use personal information provided to us to investigate the complaint in accordance with the procedures set down in Hydraulic Services Consultants (Australasia) Ltd. Disciplinary Regulations.
As a not-for-profit organisation, The Hydraulic Services Consultants (Australasia) Ltd. needs to enter into sponsorship arrangements with third parties from time to time. This allows us to keep membership fees at a low level, and to provide a greater range of services. When we enter a sponsorship agreement, we may use your personal information to provide you with information about products, services and promotions offered by our sponsors.
Disclosure of your personal information
The Hydraulic Services Consultants (Australasia) Ltd. may disclose personal information and sensitive information as defined by the Privacy Act, held about you to:
- A membership Executive Committee panel to assess applications and investigate complaints;
- Members authorised to vote on candidates elected to office bearing positions and judging committees for awards and honours;
- Australian Education International - NOOSR for migration statistical reporting;
- Members on the same Committee or group; and
- A person or agency when you are nominated for an honour or award.
With your consent, we disclosure your membership status of Hydraulic Services Consultants (Australasia) Ltd. to third parties. Third parties include employers, statutory authorities, customers or members of the public.
The Hydraulic Services Consultants (Australasia) Ltd. may disclose personal information when we contract out specialised functions and activities. These may include printing of renewal invoices, membership cards, and arrears notices, and conference information. We may also provide names and addresses to a mailing house to mail information to you. In these situations, we prohibit the third parties from using personal information about you except for the specific purpose for which we supply it.
The Hydraulic Services Consultants (Australasia) Ltd. makes certain registers and lists publicly available. For instance, if you are recorded on a register or other listing, such as Approved Consultants Registers, or if you are an office bearer on the Executive Committee, National Executive Committee or a committee, we disclose personal information such as name and contact details through various means, either through publications, websites or verbally to members of the public.
We treat all personal information held about you as confidential. This applies except where disclosure of your personal information is compelled by law, in the public interest, or with your consent.
In the event of a complaint against you, disclosure of personal information is restricted to those authorised under the Disciplinary Regulations.
Accuracy of your personal information
If we have accurate personal information about you, it enables us to provide you with the best possible service. We take reasonable steps to ensure that your personal information is accurate, complete and up to date whenever we collect or use it.
If you find that the personal information we hold about you is inaccurate, incomplete or out of date, please contact us immediately. Alternatively, you may correct this yourself through the member services section of the website.
Access to your personal information
You may access limited personal information through our secure member services section on our website. Alternatively, on request, we will provide you with access to your personal information. Your request will be dealt with in a reasonable time and we may charge you a small administration fee for sending the information to you.
Security of your personal information
The Hydraulic Services Consultants (Australasia) Ltd. protects any personal information that we hold about you from misuse and loss. We protect your privacy by restricting access to your personal information to those staff or authorised office bearers who need it, either to process information or to provide you with membership services. Our staff and office bearers are responsible for handling personal information in accordance with the Privacy Act.
Your personal information may be stored as hardcopy documents, or as electronic data. We maintain physical security over our paper and electronic data stores and premises. We also maintain computer and network security. For example, we use firewalls, security measures for the Internet and other security systems such as user identifiers and passwords to control access to computer systems.
The Hydraulic Services Consultants (Australasia) Ltd. will keep your information for as long as it is needed to provide you with the products and services you have requested from us. We will take reasonable steps to destroy or permanently de-identify personal information when we no longer need it.
Our online applications available to members from the website undergo extensive security testing by external professional companies to ensure your data is protected to the highest level against potential hacking. All data transmitted between web browsers and our online applications are protected by encryption.
Resolving your concerns
If you believe that the privacy of your personal information has been compromised, you are entitled to complain. If you have a complaint, contact the area where you believe the breach has occurred. If your complaint is not resolved to your satisfaction, forward a written complaint to:
The Privacy Officer - HCAA Ltd.
PO Box 177
Croydon NSW 2132
A written complaint must include a return address, and identify the conduct that is the basis for the complaint. There are no fees for lodging a complaint.
We Use Mollom
Our web service – We operate a web service that tries to determine the quality of messages posted to a website, and particularly tries to determine whether these messages are to be considered as unsolicited messages (also called "spam"). Nowadays, websites that allow visitors to contribute or post comments (such as blogs, discussion forums, wikis, etc.) are flooded with inappropriate commercial messages that are distracting for all visitors, and are sometimes even highly illegal. These commercial messages are often uploaded in an automatic way. Our service screens messages before they are posted to the website.
How it works – When you post a message on a website that uses our service (called "the website" in the remainder of this text), the website's server will first send your message – as well as some information about your identity (such as your IP address, name or nickname, e-mail address and OpenID) – to our server. Our server will then compare your message and your identity details with all elements in our database, and perform several complex statistical computations in order to assess the quality of your message (e.g., spam, abuse, etc.).
If our server then determines that the content of your message is of insufficient quality or constitutes spam or abuse, it will inform the website thereof. The website server may then decide to reject your message, or to provide you with an additional question to find out whether you are in fact a human being, and not a machine trying to send out as much commercial communications as possible. Please note that it is sometimes possible that our server wrongfully determines the actual quality of the content of your message, or wrongfully considers your message as spam or abuse.
What we store about you – We store all information provided to us by the website. This will include, in particular, the following personal data about you (to the extent effectively provided to us by the website): the content of your message, your name or nickname, IP address, user ID, OpenID, e-mail address, URL of your website, and the date and time you post a message.
How long we store this data – Your data is stored in our databases for at most two months. After this period of two months, we can continue to store your data in anonymized way for a period of two years.
How we use your personal data – We use your personal data to assess the quality of your message, and to find out whether your message constitutes spam, by comparing your data with all other data of all other users in our databases. Afterwards, we also use your personal data to make similar assessments for all other websites that use our service, as the more information we store in our database, the better we can assess whether a message is genuine.
While we sometimes provide statistical information (trends, numbers, etc.) generated from our databases to third parties, please rest assured that you cannot be identified on the basis of this statistical information.
Note that we hate spam as much as you do – in fact, our service is specifically targeted at removing spam. So, we will never provide your email address to third parties, and we will never send any spam ourselves to you. In most cases, we will not even be aware of your e-mail address.
Also note that we can provide access to your personal data in case of illegal or abusive use, or in case we receive orders from a competent legal authority.
How we protect you – We are bound by the strict rules of Belgian and European data protection legislation, which prevents us from making unlawful use of your personal data. Please note that the website's operator may be bound by other rules, depending on his jurisdiction.
Your rights – You have the right to gain access to, correct and/or remove all personal data we store about you on our servers. All this is provided to you free of charge. In order to exercise your rights, please contact us.
