Privacy policy
This policy covers outbackrated.com.au. It is written to be read, not to be survived.
Related pages sit either side of this one: the research method behind every figure on the site and who pays us, how much, and what we refuse. To ask what personal information we hold about you, or to have it corrected or deleted, use the contact form.
Where we sit under Australian privacy law
The Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs) in Schedule 1 of that Act apply to organisations the Act calls APP entities. Under the small business operator exemption, most businesses with an annual turnover of $3,000,000 or less fall outside the Act. Outback Rated is well under that threshold, so the Privacy Act does not currently apply to us.
We have written this policy to the APP standard anyway, because the exemption is about our turnover and not about your interests.
Be aware of what that means in practice: because the exemption applies, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner generally cannot investigate a privacy complaint about this site. That is a genuine limit on your options and you should know it rather than discover it. If our turnover ever exceeds the threshold, or if we opt in to the Privacy Act voluntarily through the OAIC’s public opt-in register, we will say so on this page.
What we collect
Website analytics. We use a third-party analytics service to count what gets read. It records pages viewed, the page that referred you, an approximate location derived from your IP address, and general device and browser information. We look at it in aggregate. It does not tell us who you are, and we make no attempt to link it to a name.
The contact form. When you send us a message we collect your name, your email address, the topic if you select one, your message, the page you sent it from, the time, and your IP address. The IP address is used for spam filtering and it appears in the email we receive.
Spam filtering records. Submissions the filter rejects are written to a server log that includes the message content and the IP address. This exists so a genuine message wrongly caught by the filter can be found and answered. The filter also rate-limits submissions per IP address.
What we do not collect
No accounts, no passwords, no payment details (we never take payment from readers). No advertising pixels, no retargeting tags, no social media tracking scripts. No sensitive information as the Privacy Act defines it. We do not sell, rent, trade or otherwise supply personal information to anyone for a benefit. That last point matters legally as well as ethically: trading in personal information is an exception that pulls a small business back inside the Privacy Act.
Outbound links to retailers
When you click a link to a retailer, you leave this site. The retailer and its affiliate network then receive standard referral information and set their own cookies on their own domains. From that point their privacy policy applies, not ours, and we cannot see or control what they collect.
We do not attach anything to those links that identifies you. Affiliate tracking codes we use carry page or campaign labels only, never a hashed email address, a user identifier or a session tied to a person.
Information sent overseas
Some of the services this site runs on are outside Australia:
- Our website hosting provider, whose servers are outside Australia.
- Our website analytics provider, which processes analytics data outside Australia, most likely in the United States.
- Resend (United States), which delivers contact form messages to our inbox.
- The affiliate networks and retailers you click through to, which include Australian and overseas entities.
Under APP 8, an entity disclosing personal information overseas must take reasonable steps to ensure the recipient does not breach the APPs. We choose established providers with published data-processing terms, we keep what we send them to the minimum, and we review what is running on the site rather than setting it and forgetting it.
Cookies and tracking
Analytics uses cookies or equivalent identifiers to tell repeat visits from new ones. You can block or clear cookies in your browser, and the site will still work normally. Nothing here depends on you accepting tracking, which is why you are not being chased around this page by a consent banner demanding it.
How long we keep things
Contact form messages stay in our email inbox for as long as we need them to deal with what you wrote about. Server logs, including spam-filter records, are held under our hosting provider’s own retention settings and are not archived by us. Analytics data is retained by the analytics provider under its retention settings.
Access, correction and complaints
You can ask us what personal information we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. Use the contact page to send that request.
We will respond within a reasonable period. If we cannot do what you have asked, we will tell you why.
If you want to complain about how we have handled your information, say so through the same form and mark it as a complaint. We will look at it and reply to you directly. If you are not satisfied with our answer, general guidance on privacy rights in Australia is published by the OAIC at oaic.gov.au, noting the limit on their jurisdiction over us described at the top of this page.
Changes
We will update this page whenever what we run on the site changes, and we will change the date at the top when we do.