Privacy Policy
In handling your personal information, Queensland Teachers’ Credit Union (QTCU) is committed to complying with the Privacy Act 1988, the National Privacy Principles (NPP) and the Credit Union Code of Practice.
- Protecting Your Privacy
- Collection of Personal Information
- Use of Personal Information
- Anonymity
- Providing Your Personal Information to Other Parties
- Marketing Information
- What If You Do Not Wish To Provide Us With Information?
- Keeping Your Personal Information Up-To-Date
- Accessing Your Information
- Storing Your Personal Information Securely
- QTCU Security Policy
- Website Security and Privacy
- Cookies
- Resolving Your Concerns
- How to Make a Complaint
- Changes to This Policy
- Need More Information?
- How We Handle Emails
- Site Information
- Terms and Conditions, Fees and Charges
- NetAccess Security
1. Protecting Your Privacy
Protecting your privacy and the confidentiality of your personal information in a secure and controlled way is extremely important to us.
We understand the importance of privacy to our members and that is why we are committed to ensuring that our systems and procedures protect your personal information.
The QTCU Privacy Policy seeks to provide a clear and concise explanation of how and when we collect, use and store personal information from members.
This Privacy Policy covers the entire operations of QTCU including our website.
2. Collection of Personal Information
We collect personal information from you when you apply for membership and when you apply to use our products and services. As a result, we collect most personal information directly from you.
The type of information collected and stored by QTCU generally includes your name, address, age, date of birth, telephone number, account numbers, membership number, email address, fax number, transaction history, products and services preferences and financial details such as income, credit history, place of work, assets and liabilities. In certain circumstances we may also collect sensitive information such as health details. Sensitive information will not be used by the Credit Union for any other purpose than that for which it is collected.
There may be occasions when we need to source personal information about you from a third party. For example, we may collect personal information from a credit reporting agency, a finance broker or an insurer of your mortgage. We will only hold information obtained from credit checks if you have specifically authorised us to carry out those credit checks.
We may also hold account and signatory information which you provide in connection with your application (including 100 point check or identification reference) for the credit union to establish your identity and the identity of signatories to accounts, in the manner required by the Financial Transaction Reports Act 1988.
3. Use of Personal Information
We collect information from you to enable us to:
- provide membership benefits to you;
- provide you with the products and services you require; and
- provide you with information about products and services available to you from QTCU and associated businesses including information about discounts, competitions and special offers.
We may use or disclose your personal information for purposes related or ancillary to the main reason we collect it, such as:
- increasing our relationship with you;
- internal accounting and administration;
- regulatory reporting and compliance;
- protecting you and QTCU from error and fraud;
- communicating with your executor, administrator, trustee, guardian, attorney, guarantor or authorised signatories to your accounts.
We may contract out some of our functions and activities to third parties; for example, we may provide names and addresses to a mailing house to mail account statements 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. We also ensure confidentiality clauses are included in service contracts with these organisations.
We do not use your tax file number (TFN), pension number, Medicare number or any other Commonwealth agency identifier as your account, policy or application number. We only use and disclose these numbers for the purposes required by law, such as, disclosing your TFN to the Australian Taxation Office.
4. Anonymity
Where it is lawful and practicable, the Privacy Principles provide that individuals must have the option of not identifying themselves (ie remaining anonymous) when entering into transactions with an organisation. Due to the nature of the transactions conducted between you and the Credit Union, anonymity is not always possible.
5. Providing Your Personal Information to Other Parties
In providing products and services to you it may be necessary for us to provide your personal information to other organisations with whom we conduct business.
Such organisations include related entities, card and cheque book suppliers, electronic funds transfer switch companies, solicitors and legal advisors, accountants and auditors, printers and mailing houses, insurers, collection agents, conveyancers, valuers, Credit Union Services Corporation Australia Ltd, marketing consultants, rewards programs, Redihealth provider, funds manager and/or stockbrokers and Government Agencies which regulate our products and services or require us to carry out our legal obligations.
Your personal information is only provided to those entities to the extent necessary to enable us to provide our products and services to you and to the extent required by law.
QTCU undertakes not to sell, rent or trade your personal information to any other party.
We have a duty to keep all personal information we hold about you.
We will not disclose information about you unless the disclosure is:
- Compelled by Law – for example, various Government departments and agencies have the power to order us to disclose information on your accounts and disclosure to the Courts under subpoena.
- Authorised by Law – for example, where a crime, fraud or misdeed is committed or is suspected, and disclosure in the public interest and against the member’s rights to confidentiality is justified.
- In QTCU’s Interest – for example, disclosure to a Court in the event of legal action to which QTCU is a party.
- With your Consent – you have consented to our disclosing the information about you.
- Your consent is important, and can be expressed or implied.
- Your express consent can be verbal or written.
- Your implied consent can be taken when we can reasonably conclude that you have given consent by some action you take, or when you decide not to take action. For example, if you use our telephone banking service, Tele-access, and continue the call after hearing the recorded message telling you that the call may be monitored or recorded for training purposes you have given us your implied consent to monitor or record your call.
6. Marketing Information
If you consent to us doing so, we may provide you with information from time to time about new products and services available to you from QTCU, or other businesses with whom we have a relationship.
Your consent to our providing this information to you will be implied unless you notify us that you do not wish to receive this information. You may do this by contacting our Privacy Officer and advising that you do not wish to receive marketing information.
7. What If You Do Not Wish To Provide Us With Information?
In order to provide products and services to you we require information about you. If you do not provide us with all of the information we require, we may be unable to accept your application for membership or provide products and services to you. If you do not provide us with your Tax File Number, there may also be taxation implications for you.
8. Keeping Your Personal Information Up-To-Date
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.
We will collect personal information. If you find that current personal information we hold about you is inaccurate, incomplete or out-of-date, please contact us immediately and we will correct it.
9. Accessing Your Information
Under the Privacy Act, you have a right to access personal information we hold about you.
QTCU shall, on request, provide you with information we hold about you which is readily accessible and which may lawfully be provided. QTCU requires that you, as clearly as possible, identify the information requested and where it may be located.
If the information is incorrect, you have the right to require us to amend this information.
QTCU may recover from you its reasonable cost of supplying you with this information. QTCU will advise you of the anticipated cost before retrieval and/or copying of the documentation is undertaken. Your request to provide information will be dealt with in a reasonable time, usually 10 days from the date of request.
10. Storing Your Personal Information Securely
We protect any personal information that we hold from misuse and loss. We also protect it from unauthorised access, modification and disclosure.
Only authorised users can access your personal information and access is only for approved purposes.
Your personal information may be stored in hardcopy documents, as electronic data, or in QTCU’s software or systems.
We maintain physical security over our paper and electronic data stores and premises, such as locks and security systems. 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.
11. QTCU Security Policy
We have comprehensive security policies and procedures documented in our internal security policy. Your personal information will be recorded, amended and deleted only by authorised means. In addition, all employees sign confidentiality agreements as a condition of working for QTCU.
12. Website Security and Privacy
The Internet has rapidly changed the way we do business – it allows QTCU to provide banking and financial services that you can access from the convenience of your own home or office.
We understand that you may be concerned about the confidentiality and security of the personal information we collect about you online. Accordingly, we have systems in place to ensure our online dealings with you are as secure and confidential as your dealings with us in person, or on the telephone.
Should you access our website we use cookies to determine the identity and validity of the member number and password you are providing. The Internet Banking facility has password lockout after nominated failed attempts. This data is returned to our server under an encryption program that is meaningless to anyone else. Network security includes firewall and virus protection and network intrusion detection systems.
Details relating to our website security and privacy are available from the QTCU website Security and Privacy Statement at www.qtcu.com.au
13. Cookies
What are cookies and what are they used for?
Internet cookies are small strings of text placed on users’ hard drives during the exchange of data that happens when a browser points to a website. Cookies are random data tags to identify you as a distinct, unnamed visitor to our Internet site. Cookies have no way of disclosing your name or any personal information.
Cookies can store a password or ID that some Internet sites require, freeing you from typing them in every time you land on the site. They can also remember preferences you enter and then tailor a site to each user’s unique tastes.
What does Queensland Teachers’ Credit Union use cookies for?
The Credit Union may use cookies to track where users go on our site. Our cookies embed a random identifying number on each user’s browser. Then we note where your number shows up on our site. The data lets us determine what content people like and where to put things to make them easy to find.
The Credit Union sets one cookie on the website. We tag your browser when you first hit our site. But, if you refuse our request to place a cookie, we’ll keep asking to place one every time you move through our site. It’s not that we set a lot of cookies, we’ve just programmed our site to set the cookie whenever an untagged user moves to any screen.
The Credit Union may decide to use a cookie to track user traffic patterns on our site. Our cookies simply identify your browser with a number so we can separate out unique users. A lot of sites use cookies, but not a lot of them explain why. We want you to know where we stand on cookies, how ours work and what we use the resulting data for. If our policies on cookies change, we will advise you accordingly on our website.
"Session" Cookies
As part of the NetAccess Internet banking system, when you log on a session object is created to pass encrypted (secured) information from one screen to another. This session ID is not written to your hard disk at all, but stored in memory. Once your Internet banking session is terminated, the session object is destroyed. However, to be able to utilise a session object (and therefore NetAccess) your browser must have cookies enabled.
14. Resolving Your Concerns
If you believe that the privacy of your personal information has been compromised, you are entitled to complain. We will respond to your complaint as soon as possible but within 2 working days, to let you know who is responsible for managing your complaint. We will try to resolve the complaint within 5 working days. When this is not possible, we will contact you within that time to let you know how long we estimate it will take to resolve the complaint.
We have also appointed a Dispute Advocate who will objectively and impartially investigate your complaint if you are dissatisfied with our internal complaints process.
If we refuse to give you access to the personal information you request we will, under the NPP, provide you with reasons for our refusal.
15. How To Make A Complaint
Complaints are to be addressed to our Customer Relations Officer.
Mail:
QTCU Customer Relations Officer
PO Box 929
FORTITUDE VALLEY 4006
Fax: (07) 3252 7053
Email: qtcu@qtcu.com.au
16. Changes To This Policy
QTCU may make changes to this Privacy Policy from time to time for any reason. We will publish those changes on our website.
17. Need More Information?
If you have a query on how your personal information is collected and used, or any other query relating to QTCU’s Privacy Policy, call the Privacy Officer on 3842 6235 or the QTCU Contact Centre on 13 29 30 8.25 am to 7 pm EST, Monday to Friday.
18. How We Handle Emails
We will preserve the content of any email you send us. Once we receive your transmission we take every reasonable step to to preserve the security of the information in our own system.
19. Site Information
We follow quality procedures to ensure information on the site is current, however all information provided is for general purposes only and subject to change. We strongly recommend discussion with a QTCU staff member before acting on any information given in the site regarding QTCU products and services.
20. Terms and Conditions, Fees and Charges
To ensure you are fully aware of details relating to products and services, you should read the full terms and conditions, user guides and any fees and charges schedules.
21. NetAccess Security
NetAccess uses a security encryption method to scramble the data sent between your computer and ours. This safeguards all packets of information transferred between the web server's secured directories and your home computer. NetAccess is provided to QTCU by a third party supplier who is a member of the internet security body, AusCERT.
