Your Privacy

Your privacy is always at the heart of everything we do. We are firmly committed to keeping your personal details private, even if this means that, sometimes, we may not be able to serve you as quickly as you might wish.

In this Privacy Policy, a reference to ‘our products and services’ is a reference to the products and services available through checkmyfile.com.au. References to ‘we’ and ‘us’ means Checkmyfile Pty Ltd.

We make the following simple, strong statements about privacy so you can be clear about our commitment to you.

We will never sell your email address to anyone.
  
We will never disclose your personal details to anyone unless we have your permission to do so, or if we are compelled to do so by Court Order or under compulsion of law.
  
We do not ask you for your telephone number.
  
We do not seek your name when you use our Free Credit Score service. This information is provided by you anonymously.
  
We do not seek your name when you provide us with  the lifestyle information required when you use our Free Identity Theft Expert System. This information is provided by you anonymously.
  
You may opt out or opt back in to receive our monthly emails at any time. Every monthly email we send contains a simple one-click ability to opt out.

What types of personal information we collect

When you use our free services, we do not collect any identifying information such as your name. You may use these services anonymously.

If you purchase credit reports from us, we collect your personal information to enable us to search credit reference agencies on your behalf and to ensure that the correct credit report is provided to you.

We collect personal information from you including your title, first name, middle name, surname, postal address and postcode and your date of birth.  We also collect your email address so we may communicate with you.

If you contact us with queries or comments about our products and services this may also result in a collection of personal information.

How we use your information

Your IP address is used to help diagnose problems with our server, and to administer our website. Your IP address is used to help identify you and your search requirements and to gather broad demographic information.

We use small, harmless cookies to deliver content specific to your interests. We do not extract any information from your computer.

When you purchase a credit report on checkmyfile.com.au, we ask you for identification information (such as your name and date of birth), contact information (such as your address and email address) and secret information that you share with us (such as your password). We do not share any of this information with any third party, other than for obvious purposes (for example we need to give your name address and date of birth to the credit reference agencies when we search you).

The information that we collect about you is used to also provide initial credit rating assessments and reports, products and services and related information when requested.

Once we have provided you with a credit report or other credit rating information, we store that report and information securely so that you may retrieve the information in future.

The answers you give to our anonymous and free services, such as our Free Credit Score and Free Identity Theft Check are not stored against you personally.  We collect the answers you give and add them to other answers given by other customers to help build a database for statistical purposes. This database is used to help validate our Check your Local Area service and is provided to our geodemographic data suppliers to enable them to build more accurate databases. No individual answer, or set of answers given by you is stored against your name.

Authentication – ensuring we only provide your data to you

When you buy a credit report from us, we take several measures to ensure that we only reveal the contents of your credit report to you. We never reveal exactly how we do this, as if we did, our methods would soon fall into the hands of criminals, and that would defeat the object. We do not store the information you give for this purpose.

From time to time we may need to authenticate you more carefully. The reason is always to ensure that we are releasing your personal information only to you. We will usually ask you to provide original bank statements or credit card statements addressed to you at both your current and previous addresses.

We do not extract any information from the statements, all your data is kept confidential whilst being processed and are returned to you after being used to verify your addresses. We do store securely copies of the information you provide to enable us to have an audit trail of how we authenticated you, in the event that we are called upon under the law to explain what measures we have taken to protect the security of your information.

Persons and entities to whom we disclose information

In the circumstances described below, personal information may be disclosed outside Checkmyfile Pty Ltd.

-  In connection with the provision of our products and services

We only disclose your personal information to third parties who assist us in providing our products and services.

Such entities will include our web hosts and related technology partners, credit reference agencies for the purpose of obtaining your credit reports, financial institutions for the purpose of processing payment and our parent company, Credit Reporting Agency Ltd, for the purposes of making the your credit reports and other information more easy for you to understand, Credit Reporting Agency Ltd stores all data securely on the their own database servers and web servers.

Credit Reporting Agency Ltd is a UK based company and is a fully registered credit reference agency in its own right.  It is subject to the same or more stringent privacy requirements under UK law as we are under Australian privacy law.  Credit Reporting Agency Ltd is bound by contract to hold, store and process personal information in accordance with the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) (Privacy Act).

When we disclose personal information to such entities we take formal steps to ensure that those entities:

Comply with the National Privacy Principles in the Privacy Act when they handle your personal information, and

Are authorised only to use personal information in order to provide the services or to perform the functions required by us.

- Disclosures required by law

For legal reasons, other disclosures may need to be made to law enforcement agencies, government agencies, courts or external advisers. Our policy is to only make such disclosures in accordance with the Privacy Act.

Access and Correction

Under the Privacy Act, you have a right to seek access to information which we hold about you free of charge (although there are some exceptions to this).  You also have the right to ask us to correct information about you which is inaccurate, incomplete or out of date.

If you wish to exercise your right under the Privacy Act to seek access to the personal information that we hold about you, we ask that you contact our Privacy Officer (details at the end of this Privacy Policy below), who will explain how we will handle your access request.  Please note that unless you have purchased a credit report from us, it is very unlikely that we will hold any information about you.

If you are of the view that the personal information that we hold about you is not accurate, complete or up to date, you can contact our Privacy Officer with your request for correction. Please note that we will hold and display historic records of your credit reports for you to view and if you wish to obtain up-to-date credit reports then you must purchase further reports from us.  You can however ask us to delete the historic record if you no longer wish us to hold it.

Please note that when we provide you with free access to information about your local area, this information is based on data owned by third parties and is not owned by Checkmyfile Pty Ltd.  It is reported at a level such that the data is not capable of being linked to you personally and is instead a general description of your local area.  You do not have any right to correct this data although we do provide you with the ability to give feedback if you consider it inaccurate.  We invite and collect your comments on the information provided against areas you know well. Once we have sufficient and consistent feedback, we will relay this back to the data owners.  We then ask them to consider revising their descriptions at the next review, which usually takes place once annually.

Postcode based information

Demographic and profile data is also collected at our site. This information is not held on an individual basis. We use this data to tailor your experience at our site, showing content that we think you might be interested in, and displaying the content according to your preferences. For example, we use profile data to help identify lenders who extend credit to people with your credit rating, so that we may advise you and others of our findings. We do not pass your personal information to any lender except  with your consent to do so.

Links to other websites

checkmyfile.com.au contains links to other sites. We are not responsible for the privacy practices or the content of such web sites.

Online surveys

Our online surveys are optional. The information you provide as an individual respondent is kept confidential and is aggregated with all other responses to provide the survey results.

Security

We take all reasonable steps to ensure the security of personal information held by us and have security measures in place to protect the loss, misuse and alteration of the information under our control.

These include the issue and use of passwords, powerful encryption and computer firewalls to guard against hacking. From time to time we may have to suspend services whilst we investigate a breach of security.

You are also obligated, under the Terms and Conditions you agree to abide by when you use our services, to report any suspected breach to us immediately.

Access to personal information held in our internal systems is restricted to those employees who are authorised to access that information.  Our employees and any third parties who assist us to provide information to you (as described above) are kept up-to-date on our security and privacy practices. 

Any time new policies are added and from time to time, our employees and such third parties are notified and reminded about the importance we place on privacy and what they can do to ensure that your personal information is protected.

If you have any questions about the security at our website, you can send an email to our Privacy Officer. Contact details are given at the foot of this Privacy Policy.

Supplementation Information

We supplement the information that you provide with information received from third parties, (such as the Australia Post Postcode Address File, which helps confirm your address).

Opt-Out

You have the following options if you do not wish to receive future marketing communications from us. Please note that we are still required to notify you from time to time of any significant changes to our terms and conditions, even after you express a preference not to receive marketing communications.