Welcome to Contact Publishing Pty Ltd’s Privacy Policy.
OUR PROMISE TO YOU:
- We will not use your contact information for spam
- We will not sell or volunteer your information for commercial gain
- We will not knowingly do anything illegal, immoral or objectionable with your information
General:
This web site – https://www.contactairlandandsea.com – to which other URLs under our control are automatically redirected (for example, http://www.militarycontact.com and http://www.aussiecontact.com) is owned and operated by Contact Publishing Pty Ltd – a legally registered company in Australia.
We recognise that your personal information is important to you and that you are concerned with its collection, use and disclosure.
We are bound by Australian Privacy Principles as set out in the Privacy Act 1988 which sets clear standards regarding these activities.
This policy contains information about:
- the kinds of personal information we collect and hold;
- how we collect and hold your information;
- the purposes for which we collect, hold, use and disclose your information;
- your right to access or seek correction of your information; and
- how you may complain about privacy matters.
We are also compliant with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), as discussed below.
GDPR:
We believe we comply with the European Union’s May 2018 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in so far as…
- we do not have an establishment within the European Union;
- we do not directly monitor the behaviours of individuals in the EU – or anywhere;
- we do not directly collect or store information about any identifiable individual (except were necessary – and you agree to it);
- we only use reputable GDPR-compliant service providers to collect and store information on our behalf;
- this web site is operated by just one individual (well below the 250-employee threshold for most GDPR compliance).
The owner/operator of this web site does not in any circumstances directly collect or store personal-identification information about anybody, either in the EU or Australia or anywhere. We pay reputable service providers (such as Sendinblue, PayPal etc) to collect, store and secure information on our behalf – and, to the best of our knowledge, their collection and storage of information is completely secure, ethical and in compliance with GDPR and other privacy regulations.
Certain functionalities of this web site may rely on cookies and other tracking elements to allow them to function. These cookies are mainly operated by the above reputable service providers. The owner/operator of this site does not use cookies himself for any purpose.
While we do actually offer goods for sale world wide, including to citizens of the EU, we have not to this time made any sales to residents of the EU and, even if/when we do, the only information we will collect at that time will be the bare minimum required to gain payment for such goods or services and to ship them successfully to their new owner – and thereafter undertake to delete all such information should the customer request it.
Advertising:
This web site and our other offerings are funded mainly through advertising sales or affiliate-advertiser commissions.
To that end, advertisements are presented on or within our products or offerings, including on this web site. We also present some advertising that was not paid for – such as for charities or causes we support (and for our own ‘in-house’ promotions).
In the case of ‘affiliate advertisements’ (where we are paid a commission based on your spend with the advertiser) that advertiser needs to track your interactions with them for the purpose of accurately calculating the commission owed to us.
At this time, our sole affiliate advertising partner is Military Shop.
Your support of our commercial advertisers helps us fund our offerings, and is therefore fully encouraged.
However, when you click on an advertisement, all interactions and relationships thereafter between you and that advertiser are completely between you and that advertiser (and their agents and affiliates), including the privacy, data collection and tracking policies of those advertisers (their agents and affiliates).
In all cases, your interaction with those advertisements (whether ‘traditional’ paid advertising, ‘affiliate’ advertising or free advertising) and those linked companies, establishes a relationship between you and those advertisers which does not directly involve Contact Publishing – and, it may not in any way be assumed to include a direct relationship directly involving Contact Publishing.
We accept no liability or responsibility for your interactions with our advertisers or their web site practices in relation to cookies, tracking, data collection and storage, etc etc.
Embedded content on our web site:
All videos on this site are hosted on YouTube or other video carriers and all our magazines are hosted by Issuu – and subsequently ’embedded’ on our site or in our stories.
Embedded content from other websites such as YouTube and Issuu behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor had visited that other website – and therefore that other web site’s privacy and data collection policies apply.
These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracing your interaction with the embedded content.
These other sites may or may not be in full compliance with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
You should be aware of this when browsing our web site (and all others across the Internet).
We accept no liability or responsibility for those third-party web site practices in relation to cookies, data collection and storage, tracking etc etc.
What information do we collect?
Generally, you have no obligation to provide any personal information requested by us. However, if you choose not to provide such information as may be necessary, there may be circumstances when we cannot provide you with the goods or services that you seek.
The main reasons we collect personal information is so that we can provide you with a FREE SUBSCRIPTION to our magazines – or to sell you a product such as paper-based magazines, books or other merchandise – or, if you have something to sell, to sell you advertising in future magazines or online or in any of our other offerings.
Subscribers: When you subscribe to our FREE magazines, we only ask you to provide your email address. This is currently the only information we collect for this purpose.
We engage a reputable service provider (Sendinblue) to collect and store this information for us.
You can access your own subscription information on Sendinblue at any time, via links provided in our fortnightly newsletters, to delete, amend or add to your stored information.
You can also write to us at editor@militarycontact.com to request direct human intervention to alter, unsubscribe or delete your information.
We do not disclose your information/email address to third parties (unless required by law).
We do not give advertisers, marketers or other third parties access to our database of emails for the purpose of unsolicited contact. If any company wants to communicate with you, they must purchase advertising for placement in our magazines, on our web site or in our newsletter.
We may from time to time establish ‘partnerships’ with other companies, who may want to communicate with you. In which case, however, their message will most likely be communicated to you through us. In other words, the message will be in the form of an email, advertorial or advertising sent to you by us on their behalf (and not sent direct by them – i.e. we will not pass on your email address to our partners).
We will not ‘spam’ you ourselves with emails for any other purpose than to send you our fortnightly newsletter or to notify you that there is a new magazine available to read or that there are old magazines newly digitised and added to our web site and available for access/download – or the aforementioned partner communications that we think are necessary and/or helpful to grow our business and/or deliver a better service to you.
Sales: If you purchase a product from us (e.g. paper-based back-issue magazine), we will require extra information from you. Naturally, this will include a postal address so we can send the product to you. It may also require us to collect credit card details from you for the purposes of payment.
However, all this is totally voluntary on your part, understanding that if you do not provide the necessary information, we may be unable to provide the goods or services.
Advertisers: If you are an advertiser or the representative of an advertiser, please know that you are our life blood. A FREE magazine cannot exist without you.
When we sell advertising to advertisers we will collect that information which is necessary for the purposes of that business-to-business commercial relationship.
We may also vet your web site to ensure that you and your offerings are a suitable match for our audience.
While we collect personal and/or business information from you, we limit the scope of that information to that which is necessary for the purpose of the transaction and we only hold on to that information for normal accounting and record-keeping purposes.
If you are not an advertiser but you choose to purchase goods or services from an advertiser who advertised via one of our platforms or offerings, your relationship in regards to that commercial transaction is between you and that advertiser and does not or should not include Contact Publishing. Contact Publishing accepts no responsibility for the quality of the goods or services or for the relationships or the privacy implications arising out of any such purchase or arrangements or relationships with any third party.
Comments on our web site
When you seek to leave comments on our web site, our site may automatically ask you for personal information and, if you volunteer this information, our site may automatically use a ‘cookie’ or other device to recognise you on your return. This is done purely for your convenience, so that you don’t have to enter the same information again when you return. We do not collect or harvest any of this information.
When visitors leave comments on our web site some information, such as your name, will be publicly visible against your comment. Other gathered information (mainly technical, to do with the functionality of the Internet) will not be visible.
The term ‘comment’ includes any attached or embedded ‘media files’ such as photos, Word docs etc.
If you upload images or other ‘media’ to our web site, you should be mindful of including embedded location data or any other identifying detail you would not wish to be published or disseminated or publicly disclosed.
Because this is a ‘magazine/news’ web site, you should understand that all comments left on our web site are public and may be treated as ‘letters to the editor’ – and may therefore be quoted and/or republished in other parts of our business, including on this web site and in our magazines. We may or may not seek your permission before re-publishing comments.
Our web site automatically holds comments that contain links and/or swearwords for vetting by admins. This could take up to 48 hours, but is generally much quicker.
All comments are vetted at some point, whether held or published – and we reserve the right in our sole and absolute discretion to edit or delete any comment without notice to the author. We do this to uphold our standards and reputation.
Why would we disclose personal information?
We retain only documents and information, both hard copy and electronic, in accordance with normal retention practices for accounting, legal and business purposes. If personal information is included in such documents it may be retained as a consequence, even though its retention is not the primary purpose for keeping the record.
If you do provide personal information to us, we would only use or disclose that personal information for the purpose of providing the service we promised or for payment processing or if we are required to by law.
How do we collect and hold your personal information?
We may collect personal information in a number of ways including:
- when you order goods or services from us (online, by email, by letter or over the phone);
- when you subscribe to our free magazines and newsletters by registering your email address with our third-party service provider (Sendinblue);
- when you email or write to us for any reason; and,
- when you publicly comment on any of our websites or social media pages.
Generally, we will collect your personal information directly from you. However, we also hold information, collected incidentally, concerning individuals who work for companies or organisations that have a business relationship with us.
We sometimes ‘harvest’ publicly listed email addresses from websites belonging to groups or organisations that we reasonably assume could or should have an interest in receiving our magazines, newsletters etc – for example, Defence-industry companies, Defence Force Cadet Unit, RSL sub-branches, veterans’ charities and so on.
How can you unsubscribe from our free-subscription database
You may request to be unsubscribed at any time by clicking the unsubscribe link at the bottom of our emails, or by emailing editor@militarycontact.com or replying to any correspondence from us with UNSUBSCRIBE in the subject line.
Frequently Asked Questions
“I unsubscribed my email address, so why am I still getting subscription emails from you?”
“I have never subscribed to your magazine, so why am I receiving emails from you?”
Some people who unsubscribed (or requested to be unsubscribe manually) from our subscription database still continue to receive emails from us – and some people who didn’t actually subscribe at all receive subscription emails from us.
The main reason why both these things happen is because another email address on our database is being automatically redirected.
The most common reason for this is that the recipient may be the current (or sometimes even former) point-of-contact person for a publicly registered organisation such as a Cadet unit, a veteran’s organisation or other publicly listed entity.
We do ‘harvest’ publicly listed email addresses from websites belonging to groups or organisations that we reasonably assume may have an interest in receiving our magazines, newsletters etc – for example, Defence Force Cadet units, RSL sub-branches, veterans’ charities and so on.
Most such entities have publicly listed points-of-contact email addresses – for example admin.officer@2468acu.cadet.net.au – and this official address has been redirected to the private or work email of the person who holds this position.
In these cases, we are more than happy to oblige when we receive an ‘unsubscribe’ request, but we need to know what the original, redirected email address is or might be – or be given enough clues so that we can figure it out.
This issue has only once caused us or the person who wished to be unsubscribed any angst – and only then when the recipient refused to believe that another email address was redirecting to their personal address and refused to cooperate with our attempts to figure out a solution.
In any case, after all reasonable investigations by us fail to stop the emails being redirected to an unwilling recipient, such recipients are advised to add us to their spam or blocked or blacklisted email senders’ list.
How to make a complaint
If you are concerned that the way we collect, hold, use or disclose your personal information may be in breach of Australian Privacy Principles, or you simply wish to unsubscribe, please outline your concern in an email to editor@militarycontact.com or by mail to The Editor, CONTACT Publishing Pty Ltd, PO Box 3091, Minnamurra, NSW 2533.
We promise we will take all reasonable steps to address and/or rectify your concerns as soon as possible.
If you are not satisfied with our response or our reaction to your complaint, you are entitled under the Privacy Act 1988 to make a complaint to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. Information about how to make a complaint is available from the Commissioner’s website www.oaic.gov.au. We will not seek to dissuade or discourage you from making such complaints.
Can you contact us anonymously?
Definitely. You can contact us anonymously (i.e. without identifying yourself) if the communication does not require us knowing who you are. However, in certain circumstances we may need to ask you to provide personal information where it would be impracticable to deal with you anonymously. These circumstances may include where you have ordered a product or service from us or in circumstances where we are required by Australian law to collect such information.
We are also happy to consider publishing editorial, feature or other stories anonymously or under a pseudonym where we are convinced that this is necessary or warranted for your circumstances. Though in most such cases, it may be necessary and prudent for us to know your identity before agreeing to protect it publicly.
Limit of this Privacy Policy
Except as otherwise discussed in this Privacy Policy, this Privacy Policy only addresses the use and disclosure of information we collect from you. Personal information that you disclose to other parties through our web sites or social-media pages is not protected by this Privacy Policy.
We cannot be held responsible for your activities on the Internet or cannot be held responsible for any practices employed by websites that we do not own, even if we have linked, recommended or otherwise engaged with them. If you use a link to go from our website to another website, our Privacy Policy is no longer in effect. Any browsing or interaction you do with other websites, is subject to that website’s own rules and policies.
Changes to this Privacy Policy
We may change this Privacy Policy from time to time without notifying you, to reflect user feedback and our need to accurately reflect our data collection and disclosure practices and obligations, or to reflect changing technologies or internet protocols or changing laws.
Last updated: 23 June 2020
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