PRIVACY POLICY

The effective date of this Privacy Policy is the 22 February 2022

1. WHAT KIND OF INFORMATION DO WE COLLECT?

Personal information is defined in the Privacy Act and is information that can be used to personally identify an individual.

We collect personal information when you:

• sign up to receive a newsletter from us and/or subscribe to our mailing list;
• sign up as a ‘Generous Owner’;
• sign up as a ‘Developer’ or ‘Investor’;
• create a WelcomeMat profile (WelcomeMat Profile);
• complete certain criteria fields to determine your eligibility to apply for affordable rental housing;
• complete an application for affordable rental housing (Rental Application); and
• correspond with us, for example by sending us an email.

The personal information that we collect include your name, contact information (for example your email, telephone number and address), date of birth, gender, household composition and total household gross income and the details contained in the supporting documentation that you upload onto our platform as part of your profile or Rental Application. 

When we provide our Services to you, we may also request that you provide us with further information about your circumstances, including correspondence and documents, that relates to us providing the Services to you.

SENSITIVE INFORMATION

When we provide our Services to you, we may also collect sensitive information from you in our Rental Application form.  Sensitive information is defined in the Privacy Act and is a subset of personal information and includes information such as health information, and information about a person’s racial or ethnic origin.  We will always seek your consent to collect, use and disclose your sensitive information when we collect this sensitive information from you.

You may withdraw your consent to the collection, use and disclosure of your sensitive information at any time by contacting us using the details in section 9 below. Please note that if you do not consent to our collection, use and disclosure of your sensitive information then we may not be able to provide the Services to you.

OTHER INFORMATION

When you visit our Site, we may collect information about you that may not personally identify you, using web analytics tools (for example Google Analytics) which may be hosted outside of Australia and which record your use our Site, through (amongst other things) “Log Data” (recording your IP address, the date and time of your visit to the Site, the pages accessed and documents downloaded, and the referring web page) and “cookies” (as explained below). This information does not usually contain personal information. 

 

2. WHY WE COLLECT, HOLD, USE AND DISCLOSE PERSONAL INFORMATION

We collect, hold, use and disclose your personal information for various purposes relating to our business, including but not limited to:

• informing you of news and developments that we believe may be relevant and of interest to you;
• managing your subscription to any alerts or mailing lists;
• providing the Services to you;
• sharing your information with specific third party service providers to enable them to provide services to us, including information technology (“IT”) service providers, data storage providers, photocopying and archiving services and marketing services;
• investigating complaints;
• for security purposes; 
• communicating with you in the event that there has been a data breach involving your personal information; and
• to comply with any other obligations that we may have under the law or otherwise.

When you submit your personal information, including any sensitive information, in connection with a Rental Application via the Service, WelcomeMat discloses your personal information, including any sensitive information, to the housing provider for the purposes of that particular affordable rental housing application only. In respect of your personal information, including any sensitive information, which WelcomeMat discloses to the housing provider, the housing provider will handle such information in accordance with its privacy policy. It is your responsibility to review the housing provider’s privacy policy prior to disclosing your personal information to WelcomeMat. WelcomeMat will require the housing provider to make its privacy policy available to you via our Site either prior to you submitting your housing application to the housing provider, or shortly thereafter.  This paragraph also applies in relation to any registration by you as a ‘Generous Owner’ and our sharing of your personal details to a housing provider as part of our Service.

Once your housing application, ‘Generous Owner’, ‘Developer’ or ‘Investor’ details has been submitted to the housing provider (for housing applications) or third party (for Developers and Investors), WelcomeMat will hold copies of your personal information, including any sensitive information, in connection with your WelcomeMat Profile for as long as we need it to administer your account and provide the Services to you. For the purposes of administering our business and in order to comply with our legal obligations, WelcomeMat keeps a record of all housing application submissions, including information regarding the outcome of your application and the timeframe for processing your housing application.

Other than as specified in this Privacy Policy, we will not disclose your personal information to a third party without your consent. However, we cannot control, and will not be liable for, any use or disclosure of your personal information by any third party to whom your personal information is provided with your consent (including the use or disclosure of personal and/or sensitive information provided by users to housing providers).

We do not control and are not responsible for the practices employed by any other websites or services linked to or from our Site (including those operated by housing providers), including the information or content contained within them. When you use a link to go from our Site to another website or service, our Privacy Policy does not apply to those third-party websites or services. Your browsing and interaction on any third-party website or service, including those that have a link on our website, are subject to that third party's own rules and policies.

We do not permit housing providers to retain copies of the names and contact details of unsuccessful affordable rental housing applicants that have submitted applications after the relevant affordable rental property has been successfully tenanted, for the purpose of securing tenants for the housing providers’ other properties. The retaining of such information by a housing provider for this purpose is a breach of this Privacy Policy and contrary to the APPs.

OVERSEAS DISCLOSURES

For the purposes of providing the Services to you, we may disclose your personal information to entities outside of Australia including IT service providers and data storage providers. We take reasonable steps to ensure that overseas entities that receive your personal information abide by the Privacy Act including the APPs.

 

3. DIRECT COMMUNICATIONS

We may contact you by email or other means (“direct communications”) to inform you about news or other information about our business or the Services that we believe may be of interest to you. If you wish to stop receiving direct communications from us you can either follow the instructions to opt out in the direct communication or you can contact us using the details in section 9 below and we will remove your name and details from our direct communications list.

If you receive any communications from us that you believe have been sent to you other than in accordance with this Privacy Policy, or in breach of any law, please contact us immediately using the details in section 9 below.

 

4. COOKIES

A “cookie” is a small data file that many websites use in browsers to maintain user sessions from time to time. We use web logs and cookies to generate statistics and other anonymous data to assist us to gain a better understanding of how visitors use our Site. Most internet browsers automatically accept cookies; you can adjust your browser setting to not accept cookies or to prompt you before accepting a cookie from the websites you visit, however, doing so may mean you will not be able to use all or parts of our Site.

 

5. DE-IDENTIFIED and AGGREGATED DATA

We may de-identify information that you have provided to us so that we can combine this information with other information and measure, analyse and view this information in aggregate form (“Aggregated Data”). We use Aggregated Data to gain an understanding of use of the Site and the Services, for example, the date, time and geographic location of users. We may also provide Aggregated Data to third parties so that they can gain an understanding of use of the Site and Services. We take reasonable steps to ensure that:

• Aggregated Data does not contain personal information; and
• it is not possible to identify an individual from Aggregated Data.

 

6. PROTECTING YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION

We take reasonable steps to protect your personal information. We implement appropriate and up-to-date technological measures and practices and procedures to protect your personal information from misuse, unauthorised access, unauthorised modification, unauthorised disclosure and loss.

 

7. YOUR RIGHTS - CHANGING OR DELETING YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION

If you believe that the personal information we hold about you is incorrect, incomplete or inaccurate, you may review, update, correct or delete the personal information by logging into your account and updating your WelcomeMat profile. Alternately you can contact us using the details in section 9 below and request that we update, correct or delete your personal information that we hold. We may retain an archived copy of your records as required by law or for legitimate business purposes. Due to the fact that we may hold multiple copies of your personal information in our systems, there may be some delay for your requests to be reflected across all of our systems. 

 

8. FURTHER INFORMATION

If you have any questions or concerns about how we collect, hold, use or disclose personal information please contact us. We will respond to your communication within 30 days of receiving it. If you are not satisfied with the way that we have dealt with you, you may make a complaint to the Office of the Australian Privacy Commissioner: https://www.oaic.gov.au/.

If you would like any further information about your rights to privacy, please contact or visit the website of the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner at https://www.oaic.gov.au/.

 

9. CONTACT US

WelcomeMat Holdings Pty Ltd
Privacy Officer
Suite 404, Level 4, KentBridge House
491 Kent Street
SYDNEY NSW 2000
Email: privacy@welcomemat.com.au