About Time is a national newspaper for incarcerated people, by incarcerated people. It is a free print and online publication that provides essential information about issues that affect incarcerated people, including those relating to their legal affairs, health, and education. In this Privacy Policy 'the newspaper' means the About Time newspaper that is available online at https://www.abouttime.org.au/ and in physical copies.

In this Privacy Policy, 'us' 'we' or 'our' means About Time Media Limited (ABN 67 667 331 106). We are committed to respecting your privacy. Our Privacy Policy sets out how we collect, use, store and disclose your personal information.

We may change our Privacy Policy from time to time by publishing changes to it on our website. We encourage you to check our website periodically to ensure that you are aware of our current Privacy Policy.

Personal information includes information or an opinion about an individual that is reasonably identifiable. For example, this may include your name, age, gender, postcode and contact details. It may also include financial information, including your credit card information, or sensitive information about your criminal record, health information, or family members.

1 What personal information do we collect?

We may collect the following types of personal information:

• name;
• mailing or street address;
• email address;
• telephone number and other contact details;
• age or date of birth;
• volunteer or employment applications; 
• standard web log information;
• your corrections identification number and any sensitive information about your criminal record, health issues, family members, or family violence issues (if you voluntarily submit this information to us as a contributor for our newspaper and only to the extent that it is relevant for our newspaper).
• any additional information relating to you that you provide to us directly through our website or app or indirectly through your use of our website or app; and
• any other personal information that may be required in order to facilitate your dealings with us. 

2 How do we collect personal information?

We may collect these types of personal information either directly from you, or from third parties. We may collect this information when you: 

• make content submissions for our newspaper (please see our Content Policy for more information on making content submissions);
• subscribe to our newspaper;
• communicate with us through correspondence, chats, email, or when you share information with us from other social applications, services or websites; 
• apply to for a job or volunteering position with us; or
• interact with our website, newspaper content and advertising.

In addition, when you apply for a job or volunteering position with us we may collect certain information from you (including your name, contact details, working history and relevant records checks) from any recruitment consultant, your previous employers and others who may be able to provide information to us to assist in our decision on whether or not to make you an offer of employment or engage you under a contract. 

The Privacy Act contains certain exemptions in relation to certain acts undertaken in relation to journalism and employee records and related bodies corporate. Where appropriate we make use of relevant exemptions in the Act. Please see "Privacy Standards for Journalists" below.

We endeavour to collect your information directly from you. However, in some circumstances we may collect your information from third parties, such as your employer or contracting organisations, a service provider or from a publicly available record.

3 Why do we collect, use and disclose personal information?

We may collect, hold, use and disclose your personal information for the following purposes:

• to publish articles and other content in our newspaper. When publishing articles, if the contributor has asked to be anonymous, we will not disclose their personal information to any third parties (unless required by law). If the contribution is from an incarcerated person, and they have not asked to be anonymous, we will only publish their first name and the name and location of their prison. This may also be published on our website and occasionally on our social media platforms. Please see our Content Policy for more information (Section 4.4 What we don't publish);
• to enable you to access and use our newspaper;
• to operate, protect, improve and optimise our website, business and our users’ experience, such as to perform analytics;
• to send you service, support and administrative messages, reminders, technical notices, updates, security alerts, and information requested by you;
• to comply with our legal obligations, resolve any disputes that we may have with any of our users, and enforce our agreements with third parties; and
• to consider your employment or volunteer application.

4 Sensitive information

We will only collect sensitive information about you, including information about your criminal record, health matters, family history, or experiences with family violence, if you have submitted this information to us and have consented for us to collect and store this information about you. 

You can withdraw your consent at any point and ask us to destroy or de-identify the sensitive information we hold about you. Please see "accessing or correcting your personal information" below for more information about this process.

5 Privacy standards for journalists

We comply with the Australian Press Council Privacy Standards  when we collect, handle and disclose your personal information, including sensitive information, for the purposes of journalism. This applies to circumstances where we: 

• receive content submissions from you;
• draft and edit newspaper articles and content based off your content submissions; and
• keep records of your content submissions (regardless of whether they are published in our newspaper or not).

6 To whom do we disclose your personal information?

We may disclose personal information for the purposes described in this privacy policy to:

• our employees, volunteers and related bodies corporate;
• third party suppliers and service providers (including providers for the operation of our websites and/or our business or in connection with providing our products and services to you);
• professional advisers;
• payment systems operators (eg merchants receiving card payments); 
• our existing or potential agents, business partners or partners;
• anyone to whom our assets or businesses (or any part of them) are or are to be transferred;
• specific third parties authorised by you to receive information held by us; and/or
• other persons as required, authorised or permitted by law.

6.1 Disclosure of personal information outside Australia

We may disclose personal information outside of Australia to our volunteers located from time to time in foreign countries.

We will take reasonable steps to ensure that any overseas recipient will deal with such personal information in a way that is consistent with the Australian Privacy Principles.

7 Using our website and cookies

We may collect personal information about you when you use and access our website.

While we do not use browsing information to identify you personally, we may record certain information about your use of our website, such as which pages you visit, the time and date of your visit and the internet protocol address assigned to your computer. 

We may also use 'cookies' or other similar tracking technologies on our website that help us track your website usage and remember your preferences. Cookies are small files that store information on your computer, TV, mobile phone or other device. They enable the entity that put the cookie on your device to recognise you across different websites, services, devices and/or browsing sessions. You can disable cookies through your internet browser but our websites may not work as intended for you if you do so.

We may also use cookies to enable us to collect data that may include personal information. For example, where a cookie is linked to your account, it will be considered personal information under the Privacy Act. We will handle any personal information collected by cookies in the same way that we handle all other personal information as described in this Privacy Policy. 

8 Security

We may hold your personal information in either electronic or hard copy form. We take reasonable steps to protect your personal information from misuse, interference and loss, as well as unauthorised access, modification or disclosure and we use a number of physical, administrative, personnel and technical measures to protect your personal information. For example, we ensure access to personal information is confined to specific volunteers on a 'needs to know' basis. However, we cannot guarantee the security of your personal information. 

9 Links

Our website may contain links to websites operated by third parties. Those links are provided for convenience and may not remain current or be maintained. Unless expressly stated otherwise, we are not responsible for the privacy practices of, or any content on, those linked websites, and have no control over or rights in those linked websites. The privacy policies that apply to those other websites may differ substantially from our Privacy Policy, so we encourage individuals to read them before using those websites.

10 Accessing or correcting your personal information

You can access the personal information we hold about you by contacting us using the contact information below. Sometimes, we may not be able to provide you with access to all of your personal information and, where this is the case, we will tell you why. We may also need to verify your identity when you request your personal information.

If you think that any personal information we hold about you is inaccurate, please contact us and we will take reasonable steps to ensure that it is corrected.

If you have provided personal information (including sensitive information) to us and no longer want us to hold that information about you, you can contact us and make a request for us to either de-identify or delete the information about you. 

Once we receive this request to access, correct or delete your personal, we will take reasonable steps to respond to this request as soon as possible and in any event within 30 days of receiving the request.

11 Making a complaint

If you think we have breached the Privacy Act, or you wish to make a complaint about the way we have handled your personal information, you can contact us using the details set out below. Please include your name, email address and/or telephone number and clearly describe your complaint. We will acknowledge your complaint and respond to you regarding your complaint within a reasonable period of time. If you think that we have failed to resolve the complaint satisfactorily, you have a right to lodge a complaint with the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) by visiting the OAIC website. We can also provide you with information about the further steps you can take. 

12 Contact Us

For further information about our Privacy Policy or practices, or to access or correct your personal information, or make a complaint, please email info@abouttime.org.au. 

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You can also write to: 

Joseph Friedman

Managing Director & Publisher

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About Time

PO BOX 24041

Melbourne VIC 3000

Effective:

December 2024

Last reviewed:

December 2024