Privacy Statement

You can access the Hume City Council home page and browse our website anonymously, without disclosing your personal information.

The Hume City Council site does not collect or record personal information, other than information you choose to provide through our Applications for Services and Permits, Enquiries, Complaints and Payment of Fees and Charges. Online surveys may collect personal information as and when they occur (note: online surveys are in the form of a secure transaction).

Hume City Council staff use personal information collected from email and online survey sources to respond to individuals and discuss their particular enquiries.

Email addresses and any other contact details you provide will not be added to a mailing list without your consent.

Requests for access to documents containing personal information and held by Hume City Council are handled under the Freedom of Information Act 1982 and can be addressed to the Freedom of Information Officer, Hume City Council, PO Box 119, Dallas VIC 3047.

If the Freedom of Information Act is not applicable, Hume City Council will examine whether access can be given under IPP6, the access principle under the Privacy and Data Protection Act 2014.

We will not disclose your personal information to a third party without your consent, unless we are required or authorised to do so by law or other regulation. In the event of an investigation into suspected unlawful or improper activity, a law enforcement agency or government agency may exercise its legal authority to inspect the web server's records (eg. in relation to hacking or abusive messages).

We do not use cookies on our site, however some third party sites linked from Hume City Council's website do use persistent cookies. A cookie is a block of data that is shared between a web server and a user's browser. Cookies give the server information about a user's identity and website visiting patterns and preferences. You can find more information about cookies on sites such as Cookie Central (external link).

You can avoid cookies. Many web surfers object to having files, like cookies, placed onto their hard drive without their permission. There are various things you can do to avoid cookies if you do not trust them. These include:

• setting the browser cookie file to be Read Only. Whether you can do this or not may depend on what sort of Operating System (OS) or browser you are using. But if you can do this then the cookies will only last for as long as your browser is running.
• set up your computer to delete the cookies file whenever you start your browser.
• many browsers allow you to set them up so that you are notified when a cookie is to be written to your computer. However there may be instances where there are so many cookies that it becomes annoying to reject them all.
• install a software product that will reject or manage cookies for you, these include Cookie Crusher, Cookie Pal and Cookie Cruncher. You can perform an Internet search to find them.

Clickstream data is collected and used on our website. Clickstream data is a virtual trail that a user leaves behind while surfing the Internet.

The following non-personal information (ie. clickstream data) is automatically recorded by this site's web server for statistical and system administration purposes only:

• your server address
• your top level domain name (ie. .com, .au, .gov)
• the date and the time of your visit to the site
• the pages you accessed and downloaded
• the address of the last site you visited
• your operating system
• the type of browser you are using

To the extent that this data could make you identifiable, Hume City Council will not attempt to identify individuals from the records the server automatically generates unless that is necessary to investigate a breach of law or regulation. We do not use web beacons on our site, which are also known as a Web bug, pixel tag or a clear GIF. A web beacon is an often-transparent graphic image that is placed on a website (or in an email) and when used in combination with cookies, can monitor the behaviour of the user visiting the website (or sending the email).

The type of information collected might include the IP address of the computer that retrieved the image, the time the web beacon was viewed and for how long, the type of browser that retrieved the image and previously set cookie values. Web beacons are typically used by a third party to monitor the activity of a site. A web beacon can be detected by viewing the source code of a Web page and looking for any IMG tags that load from a different server than the rest of the site. Turning off the browser's cookies will prevent web beacons from tracking the user's activity. The web beacon will still account for an anonymous visit, but the user's unique information will not be recorded.

Security of your personal data Hume City Council and all employees of Hume City Council have a statutory duty to deal with your personal information confidentially (Privacy and Data Protection Act, Section 118). This website uses secure transmission facilities when appropriate (eg. survey transaction, which is seasonal). You should be aware that there are risks in transmitting information across the Internet. If you are concerned about conveying sensitive material to Hume City Council over the Internet, you might prefer to contact us by telephone or mail. Please Contact Us for further information.