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Our Policies

Email Disclaimer

Bickerton Masters email messages, together with any attachments, are confidential and intended only for the nominated recipient. Access to Bickerton Masters emails by anyone else is unauthorised. If you are not the nominated recipient (or responsible for delivery to the nominated recipient), any disclosure, copying, distribution or any action taken in reliance on it is prohibited and may be unlawful. If you are not the intended recipient please return the message to the sender and delete it from your records. The recipient of emails email shall be responsible for their own virus protection and Bickerton Masters is not liable to the recipient for any loss or damage arising from any virus infection.

Social Media Policy

The thoughts and opinions expressed on Bickerton Masters’ social media platforms, including, but not limited to, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest pages, represent the thoughts and opinions of the individual authors and commentators, and are not necessarily the views held by Bickerton Masters.

While Bickerton Masters makes every effort to monitor, moderate and respond to content and comments posted on its social media platforms during standard business hours, we can’t always respond promptly. If you have an urgent question or comment, or if there is an issue that needs resolving, please contact bm@bickertonmasters.com.au.

While this is a public forum, it is also a professional one, so we ask that comments are polite and respectful. Bickerton Masters reserves the right to review, edit and delete any comments it deems inappropriate, including, but not limited to:

  • Remarks that infringe upon the privacy of our staff, clients or stakeholders
  • Offensive or hurtful comments about clients, staff members, projects, content authors, or the Bickerton Masters brand, which may include:
    • Unsuitable language (e.g. profanity, prejudicial comments about race, ethnicity or gender)
    • Personal attacks or defamatory statements (e.g. offensive personal comments or untrue statements about a client, staff member, content author or fellow commenter) instead of disagreeing with the post, opinion or comment
    • Inappropriate, irrelevant or promotional posts and comments (e.g. spam, promotion of events, groups, pages, websites, businesses or programs not affiliated with Bickerton Masters)

By posting, commenting or submitting content to any of Bickerton Masters’ platforms you acknowledge and understand that the information you post is available for public viewing. We recommend exercising caution when posting and avoiding any reference to personal information that could make you, or your organisation identifiable.

Please note that any links to other sites shared on our social media platforms are provided as a guide, resource or reference only. Sharing information does not constitute an endorsement; as such Bickerton Masters accepts no responsibility for the content provided on external websites.

Bickerton Masters makes no claims or promises about the accuracy, completeness, or competence of the content provided or shared on social media platforms and disclaims any liability for errors and omissions. No warranty of any kind implied, expressed, or otherwise, including, but not limited to, the warranties of non-infringement of third party rights is given in respect to the content shared or published on social media platforms.

Privacy Policy

About this policy

LAST UPDATED: JANUARY 2019

The Privacy Act 1988 requires entities bound by the Australian Privacy Principles to have a privacy policy. This privacy policy outlines the personal information handling practices of Bickerton Masters Architecture Pty Ltd (BM).

This policy is written in simple language. The specific legal obligations of BM when collecting and handling your personal information are outlined in the Privacy Act 1988 and in particular in the Australian Privacy Principles found in that Act. We will update this privacy policy when our information handling practices change.

Overview

We collect, hold, use and disclose personal information, such as contact details, expressed opinions to carry out business functions or activities in accordance with the Privacy Act 1988 (Privacy Act).

These functions and activities may include, but are not limited to:

  • recruitment functions
  • customer service management
  • marketing
  • training and events
  • surveys and general research, and
  • business relationship management.

Types of information collected and held

Depending on your relationship with BM, we will collect and hold different types on personal information.  Information collected and held may include, but is not limited to:

  • Name
  • Age and gender
  • Contact details (phone, email, address)
  • Employment history
  • References/resume
  • Billing information
  • Business records
  • Opinions and statements you have shared or made
  • Information about the goods or services you provide

Sensitive information

Bickerton Masters Architecture will only collect sensitive information where you consent to the collection of the information and the information is reasonably necessary for one or more of Bickerton Masters Architecture’s functions or activities. Sensitive information includes, but is not limited to, information or an opinion about racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious beliefs, philosophical beliefs, membership of a trade union, sexual preferences, criminal record, health information or genetic information.

Collection of your personal information

The main way we collect personal information about you is when you give it to us. For example, we may collect personal information such as contact details and complaint, review, request, or report details when you:

  • contact us in person, via phone or written communication (either hardcopy or digital)
  • interact with our website or social media profiles
  • conduct a business transaction with us or our representatives
  • complete surveys or questionnaires
  • make information publicly available

We may also collect contact details and some other personal information if you are on our committees or participating in a meeting or consultation with us for any purpose.

Indirect collection

BM may collect personal information (including sensitive information) about you indirectly from publicly available sources or from third parties such as:

  • your authorised representative, if you have one
  • applicants, complainants, respondents to a complaint, investigation, application or data breach notification or the third parties’ employees and witnesses.

We also collect personal information from publicly available sources to enable us to contact stakeholders who may be interested in our work or in participating in our consultations.

Collecting through our websites

BM has its own public website — www.bickertonmasters.com.au. There are a number of ways in which we collect information though our website or other web sources.

Analytics

We use Google Analytics to collect data about your interaction with our website. Google Analytics is hosted by a third party. The sole purpose of collecting your data in this way is to improve your experience when using our site. The types of data we collect with these tools include:

  • your device’s IP address (collected and stored in an anonymized format)
  • details about your viewing device
  • geographic location, date and time when website pages were accessed
  • referring domain and out link if applicable
  • search terms and pages visited
Cookies

Cookies are small data files transferred onto computers or devices by websites for record-keeping purposes and to enhance functionality on the website. Most browsers allow you to choose whether to accept cookies or not. If you do not wish to have cookies placed on your computer, please set your browser preferences to reject all cookies before accessing our website.

Social Networking Services

We use social networking services such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to communicate with the public about our work. When you communicate with us using these services we may collect your personal information, but we only use it to help us to communicate with you and the public. The social networking service will also handle your personal information for its own purposes. These services have their own privacy policies. You can access the privacy policies for Twitter, Facebook and YouTube (a Google company) on their websites.

Email lists, registrations and feedback

We will collect information that you provide to us when signing up to mailing lists and registering for our events, or when submitting feedback.  BM will sometimes request your feedback via online forms such as ‘Google Forms’. When you save or submit a form using this service it is stored by google in accordance with Google’s privacy policy.

Disclosure

Bickerton Masters Architecture may disclose your personal information to fulfil functions outlined in the overview of this policy.  Most commonly, this will be to fulfil marketing, service provision, or recruitment functions. Disclosure will usually be internally and to related entities or to third parties such as contracted service suppliers.

BM will not disclose any personal information if the request for information is unsolicited. If we are uncertain of the validity of the request for information, we will always take reasonable steps to obtain you permission prior to sharing your personal information.

Quality of personal information

To ensure that the personal information we collect is accurate, up-to-date and complete we:

  • record information in a consistent format
  • where necessary, confirm the accuracy of information we collect from a third party or a public source
  • promptly add updated or new personal information to existing records
  • regularly audit our contact lists to check their accuracy.

We also review the quality of personal information before we use or disclose it.

Storage and security of personal information

We use a computer database called Deltek PIM to store and manage contact details.  This database is not publicly available and is only accessible by BM. We take steps to protect the security of the personal information we hold from both internal and external threats by:

  • assessing the risk of misuse, interference, loss, and unauthorised access, modification or disclosure of that information
  • taking measures to address those risks, for example, we keep a record (audit trail) of when someone has added, changed or deleted personal information held in our electronic databases and regularly check that staff only access those records when they need to
  • conducting internal and external audits to assess whether we have adequately complied with or implemented these measures.

Accessing and correcting your personal information

Under the Privacy Act (Australian Privacy Principles 12 and 13) you have the right to ask for access to personal information that we hold about you, and ask that we correct that personal information. You can ask for access or correction by contacting us and we must respond within 30 days. If you ask, we must give you access to your personal information, and take reasonable steps to correct it if we consider it is incorrect, unless there is a law that allows or requires us not to.

We will ask you to verify your identity before we give you access to your information or correct it, and we will try to make the process as simple as possible. If we refuse to give you access to, or correct, your personal information, we must notify you in writing setting out the reasons.

If we make a correction and we have disclosed the incorrect information to others, you can ask us to tell them about the correction. We must do so unless there is a valid reason not to.

If we refuse to correct your personal information, you can ask us to associate with it (for example, attach or link) a statement that you believe the information is incorrect and why.

You also have the right to request access to documents that we hold and ask for information that we hold about you to be changed or annotated if it is incomplete, incorrect, out-of-date or misleading.

How to make a complaint

If you wish to complain to us about how we have handled your personal information you should complain in writing. If you need help lodging a complaint, you can contact us.  To ensure your complaint is handled promptly, we request that you title your correspondence “PRIVACY POLICY COMPLAINT”.

If we receive a complaint from you about how we have handled your personal information we will determine what (if any) action we should take to resolve the complaint.

If we decide that a complaint should be investigated further, the complaint will usually be handled by a more senior officer than the officer whose actions you are complaining about.

We will tell you promptly that we have received your complaint and then respond to the complaint within 30 days.

If you are not satisfied with our response you may ask for a review by a more senior officer within BM.

How to contact us

You can contact us via any of the contact details available on our website (www.bickertonmasters.com.au).