We also want our customers to have confidence that in handling personal information, we afford that information an appropriate level of privacy, consistent with the National Privacy Principles.

This statement sets out our policy for dealing with your personal information.

Personal Information is any information about you that identifies you, or by which your identity can reasonably be ascertained.

HMSA collects personal information from its customers and suppliers, or employees or officers of its customers and suppliers, for purposes relating to the products and services it offers. Those purposes include:

• responding to enquiries regarding vehicles and vehicle sales products and accessories and services we offer,
• receiving feedback and dealing with complaints
• processing orders and administering accounts
• providing customer and dealer support
• applications for employment
• vehicle warranties and product recalls
• marketing and promotional activities
• product development and market research
• meeting our regulatory and legal obligations.

If we are unable to collect personal information we require, we may not be able to do business with you or the organisation with which you are connected.

Where possible, HMSA will collect your personal information directly from you. This may take place in a number of ways, such as when you give us a written order or ask us to provide a product or service over the telephone or internet.

Our website may also offer interactive facilities, such as customer enquiry or comment forms and competition entry forms, where personal information may be collected. In addition, we may obtain personal information from third parties such as our dealers and distributors, contractors and regulatory authorities.

Regardless of who provides personal information to us, it will always be handled by HMSA in accordance with this privacy policy and the National Privacy Principles.

In providing you with a product or service, we may sometimes need to disclose your personal information to others. It is generally our policy not to disclose information to external organisations, however, examples of the types of organisations we may need to disclose information to in the course of providing a product or service are:

• related bodies corporate
• HMSA dealers
• parts suppliers
• insurers and financiers
• a person outside HMSA who is contracted to us to provide a particular service on our behalf.

Some examples of the kinds of organisations with which we contract are

• mailing houses for bulk mailing of letters and notices;
• printers for marketing material; and
• accountants, lawyers and other service providers.

  Those contracted parties are not authorised by us to use personal information for anything other than the purpose for which we supplied that information to them.

  Sometimes, the law requires us to disclose personal information. For example, information may be disclosed to a court in response to a subpoena or to a Government agency such as a vehicle licensing authority or the Australian Taxation Office.

  We may also disclose personal information where the individual consents to us doing so. That consent may be written, verbal or implied from your conduct.

   

From time to time, we may use personal information to inform our customers about our products and services, or about special offers and promotions that we think may be of interest to you. We will generally give you the opportunity to express a wish not to receive direct marketing communications. You can let us know at any time if you no longer wish to receive marketing material and we will remove your details from our direct marketing database.

HMSA does not disclose personal information to organisations outside HMSA and its related companies for the purposes of allowing them to direct market their products. However, we may join motor vehicle dealers and other business associates of HMSA in joint marketing of our respective products and services to customers.

If the law requires us to provide you with information about our products or services, we will provide that information even if you have elected not to receive information about our products and services generally.

We rely on the personal information we hold in conducting our business. Therefore, it is very important that the information we hold is accurate, complete and up-to-date.

We do everything we can to ensure that the personal information we hold is accurate complete and up-to-date whenever we collect or use it. This means that from time to time, we will ask you to tell us if there are any changes to your personal information. If you find that information we hold about you is incorrect, please contact us immediately and we will correct it.

Security of personal information is important to us and we take all reasonable precautions to protect personal information from misuse, loss, unauthorised access, modification or disclosure. Some of the ways we protect personal information include:

• external and internal premises security;
• restricting access to personal information only to staff who need it to perform their day to day functions;
• maintaining technology products to prevent unauthorised computer access or damage to electronically stored information such as requiring identifiers and passwords, firewalls and anti-virus software; and
• maintaining physical security over paper records.

You can access most of the personal information we hold about you by contacting us by any of the means set out below.

We may charge an access fee to cover the reasonable cost of retrieving the information and supplying it to you.

Access to personal information may be refused in a number of circumstances, such as where the information relates to anticipated legal proceedings or the request for access is frivolous or vexatious. If we deny or restrict your access, we will explain why.

The type of personal information we collect on our website depends on how you make use of the site.

When you visit the site, our host, records your server address, domain name, the date and time of the visit and the pages viewed. This information may be collected by using cookies (data sent to your web browser, which generally allows our site to interact more efficiently with your computer). If you disable the use of cookies, your use of our site may be affected. Information collected about your visit to our site is retained for statistical and website development reasons and is not in a form which would enable us to identify you.

When visiting our site, you will not be required to provide us with any personal information unless you request information about a HMSA product or service or respond to a HMSA competition or promotion. In that case, we will ask you to provide contact details along with other information required to respond to your request or allow you to enter the competition or promotion.

The information provided may also be retained for product planning purposes, and unless you tell us that you don’t want it used for direct marketing purposes, may be used for those purposes.

If you send us an email containing personal information, we will take reasonable steps to ensure the confidentiality of that information. The content of emails is sometimes monitored by our Internet Host for maintenance and fault detection purposes. We may also monitor email for legal compliance purposes. E-mails may also be sent to our dealers or contractors when they relate to product or service enquiries or complaints. They also treat the information confidentially, but do record it in our in-house database.

Although we take steps to protect information sent by e-mail, e-mail is not a secure method of communication and if you are concerned about sending your personal information to us in this manner you may prefer to contact us by any of the other means set out below.

If you believe that the privacy of your personal information has been compromised, please let us know. You can make a complaint by contacting the person or department you were dealing with. We will respond to complaints as soon as possible.