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Privacy Policy

THE DOG SQUAD – PRIVACY POLICY

This Privacy Policy sets out our commitment to protecting the privacy of personal information provided to us, or otherwise collected by us, offline or online, including through our website. In this Privacy Policy we, us or our means THEDOGSQUAD.

This Privacy Policy is compiled (following legal advice) using the 1988 Privacy Act and its 13 included Australian Privacy Principles, as well as information from the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC). Given this site is of a non commercial nature and does not turnover any money, legislation under the 1988 Privacy Act does not apply to it, although we hold our website to the highest of standards for data privacy and protection, hence using the act as a privacy baseline.

Our commitment to privacy includes:

  • Respecting the collection, confidentiality, and security of users’ personally identifiable private information.
  • Best efforts to keep information secure, and stored locally in encrypted and secured databases.
  • Storing only relevant information needed to identify and contact a user (both on and off the website).
  • Storing only relevant information required to identify and disclose a users identity if legally required.
  • Not to misuse your personally identifiable private information, including your email address.
  • Never to spam, or sell your email address to third parties without your express permission.
  • Never to disclose any of your personally identifiable information on THEDOGSQUAD unless under legal obligation.

 

PERSONAL INFORMATION

The types of personal information we may collect about you include:

  • your name;
  • your username;
  • your email address;
  • your age and/or date of birth;
  • your demographic information, such as postcode/location;
  • your preferences and/or opinions;
  • images of you (from events);
  • your browser session and geo-location data, device and network information, statistics on page views and sessions, acquisition sources, search queries and/or browsing behaviour via referrer links;
  • information about your access and use of our website, including through the use of internet cookies and metadata;
  • your communications with our website, the type of browser you are using, the type of operating system you are using and the domain name of your Internet service provider;
  • any IP address information or other identifiable markers disclosed publically whilst accessing this website;
  • additional personal information that you provide to us, directly or indirectly, through your use of our website, associated applications, associated social media platforms and/or accounts from which you permit us to collect information; and
  • any other personal information requested by us and/or provided by you or a third party.

 

COLLECTION AND USE OF PERSONAL INFORMATION

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

  • to enable you to access and use our website, associated applications and associated social media platforms;
  • to contact and communicate with you;
  • for analytics, including to operate and improve our website, associated applications and social media platforms;
  • to comply with our legal obligations and resolve any disputes that we may have;
  • to check your email address with / against third party anti-spam engines, to verify that your email address is both legitimate and current;
  • to check for duplicate accounts;
  • to confirm your identity and legitimacy of account holder;

 

DISCLOSURE OF PERSONAL INFORMATION TO THIRD PARTIES (NON LEGAL)

We may disclose personal information to:

  • third party service providers for the purpose of providing access to this website including (without limitation) web-hosting and server providers, maintenance or problem-solving providers, add-on programmers, forum software programmers;
  • the forum owner, administrators, and moderators of THEDOGSQUAD;
  • third party sports forums owners (in order to crack down on cross forum trolling);
  • sponsors or promoters of any competition we run (for the purpose of contacting a winner);
  • anyone to whom our website (or any part thereof) may be transferred to;
  • third parties to collect and process access data, such as Google Analytics. This may include parties that store data outside of Australia.

By providing us with personal information, you consent to the disclosure of your personal information to third parties who reside outside Australia and acknowledge that we are not required to ensure that those third parties comply with Australian privacy laws.

Whilst best care is taken to keep all data “local” and in Australia, we acknowledge that in regards to some analytics, that data may be sent and stored overseas.

 

DISCLOSURE OF PERSONAL INFORMATION UNDER LEGAL REQUIREMENT

In the event of a legal subpoena, or at the request of law enforcement agencies (local or international), we may disclose your personal information.

This includes but is not limited to courts, tribunals, regulatory authorities and law enforcement officers, as required by law, in connection with any actual or prospective legal proceedings.

We may also disclose your personal information in order to establish, exercise or defend our legal rights.

 

FORFEITURE OF PRIVACY

In the following circumstances, we reserve the right to forfeit all your rights to privacy, including those covered in this privacy policy:

  • In regards to any investigation and/or legal proceedings and/or potential criminal action.
  • If you cause nuisance/are deemed a nuisance to the site.
  • If it is suspected you are a duplicate account, and in order to verify you are a duplicate account.
  • In order to contact your ISP to raise a nuisance complaint.

 

CONVERSATIONS AND “PRIVATE” MESSAGES

Xenforo provides users with the ability to converse outside of publically visible threads by way of a “conversation system”. Xenforo is careful to ensure that this does not imply any form of private messaging system.

We make no guarantees (absolute or otherwise) in regards to the privacy of such conversations.

Add-ons do exist (for some versions of Xenforo) that can be used to read users conversations, however THEDOGSQUAD will never install, use, or permit anyone to install/use such add-ons.

Conversations are stored in a secure database, accessible only by forum owners and permitted hosting support staff (on an as requested basis). This is the same with all other forum software available.

Whilst it may be possible to extract conversations from the database, access to private conversations would ONLY be instigated in the event of legal or criminal concern raised to the forum owners.

In a situation whereby user conversations could be subject to a criminal or legal investigation, the users account will be locked out, and password reset whilst an investigation is conducted into such private messages.

In such circumstances please see the above clause regarding “forfeiture of privacy”.

 

DATA STORAGE AND HOSTING SETUP

THEDOGSQUAD takes great pride in providing the fastest, most responsive experience to its users.

Our website and all its data are located in a secure Tier 4 data centre in Melbourne, with 100% uptime guarantees.

It is protected by state of the art Distributed Denial of Service Protection, fault tolerance to ensure maximum uptime, and 24/7/365 monitored support services.

Our providers data centre also peers locally in Sydney for all outgoing traffic to overseas, via multiple overseas cables.

 

CONTROLLING YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION

CHOICE AND CONSENT

Please read this Privacy Policy carefully. By providing personal information to us, you consent to us collecting, holding, using and disclosing your personal information in accordance with this Privacy Policy. You do not have to provide personal information to us, however, if you do not, it may affect your use of this website.

INFORMATION FROM THIRD PARTIES
If we receive personal information about you from a third party, we will protect it as set out in this Privacy Policy. If you are a third party providing personal information about somebody else, you represent and warrant that you have such person’s consent to provide the personal information to us.

ACCESS TO PERSONAL INFORMATION
You may request details of the personal information that we hold about you.  An administrative fee may be payable for the provision of such information.  In certain circumstances, as set out in the Privacy Act, we may refuse to provide you with personal information that we hold about you.

CORRECTION
If you believe that any information we hold about you is inaccurate, out of date, incomplete, irrelevant or misleading, please contact us using the details below. We will take reasonable steps to correct any information found to be inaccurate, incomplete, misleading or out of date.

COMPLAINTS
If you believe that we have breached the Australian Privacy Principles and wish to make a complaint, please contact us using the details below and provide us with full details of the alleged breach. We will investigate your complaint and respond to you, in writing, setting out the outcome of our investigation and the steps we will take to deal with your complaint. Please allow up to 30 days for a response to a privacy complaint (pending complexity/concerns), and understand that any decision by the forum owners is final.

REMOVAL OF ACCOUNT/POSTS
We understand there may be instances in which a user wishes to have their account and/or posts removed. Whilst all reasonable requests will be considered, please be aware that THEDOGSQUAD is under no requirement to remove any user account, or user accounts posts (singular or complete).

STORAGE AND SECURITY
We are committed to ensuring that the personal information we collect is secure. In order to prevent unauthorised access or disclosure, we have put in place suitable physical, electronic and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure the personal information and protect it from misuse, interference, loss and unauthorised access, modification and disclosure.

We cannot guarantee the security of any information that is transmitted to or by us over the Internet. The transmission and exchange of information is carried out at your own risk. Although we take measures to safeguard against unauthorised disclosures of information, we cannot assure you that the personal information we collect will not be disclosed in a manner that is inconsistent with this Privacy Policy.

COOKIES, METADATA, AND WEB BEACONS
We may use cookies on our website from time to time. Cookies are text files placed in your computer’s browser to store your preferences. Cookies, by themselves, do not tell us your email address or other personally identifiable information. We may also collect metadata in regards to your interaction with this website.

Cookies allow third parties, such as Google and Facebook, to cause any displayed advertisements to appear on your social media and online media feeds. If and when you choose to provide our Site with personal information, this information may be linked to the data stored in the cookie.

At this current point we will not be running any Google or other advertisement on this website.

We may use web beacons on our website from time to time. Web beacons (also known as Clear GIFs) are small pieces of code placed on a web page to monitor the visitor’s behaviour and collect data about the visitor’s viewing of a web page. For example, web beacons can be used to count the users who visit a web page or to deliver a cookie to the browser of a visitor viewing that page.

LINKS TO OTHER WEBSITES
Our website may contain links to other websites. We do not have any control over those websites and we are not responsible for the protection and privacy of any personal information which you provide whilst visiting those websites. Those websites are not governed by this Privacy Policy.

AMENDMENTS
We may, at any time and at our discretion, vary this Privacy Policy by publishing the amended Privacy Policy on our website. We recommend you check this page regularly to ensure you are aware of our current Privacy Policy, should this concern you.

 

PRIVACY QUICK QUESTIONS

What information do you gather for user accounts?

Primarily whatever you provide us by way of signup email address and complete in your user profile. In addition to this we may employ specific technological measures (based on this information) to detect or discipline user accounts.

What information is seen, how, and by whom?

By default any information provided in your user profile is viewable by ALL Registered Users (not guests and not banned).

Private information provided at signup (such as email address), is only accessible by Site Owner, and Site Admins.

IP address and provider information may be provided to all THEDOGSQUAD staff.

Individual IP address and email addresses may be shared with other sports forums ONLY for the purpose of removing and identifying cross forum trolls.

Will you ever send me email and if so how/why?

Where possible we will try to avoid sending you emails unless absolutely necessary. Please be aware that our forum anti-spam system may attempt to verify your email account legitimacy every so often.

Site Admins have the ability to send emails to users via the Admin Control Panel, however this is strictly prohibited unless approved by the forum owner.

Site Admins are NOT permitted to contact users via their provided email address unless permission has been approved by the forum owner.

How secure is my password?

Passwords are stored encrypted in a secure database. They are not visible to staff at all (including the site owner).

If you forget your password you will need to reset it to the email address used when creating your account. If you no longer have access to that account, please use our Support Forum and we will verify your account and reset your password for you.

Can I share accounts? How do I address account sharing?

Please be aware that THEDOGSQUAD operates on a “one account per person” basis. Should you have multiple family members in the same household (or multiple people on the same residential / business internet connection), please advise us of this so we can make notes on your user account regarding this.

Will you tell me what actions against other users?

All bans are displayed to registered users in addition to the reasons behind the ban and post in question (depending on removal status.

Under no circumstances are staff required to explain the reason behind a ban to a third party.

I’ve been on other forums and my posts cache to Google after posting, does that happen here?

Currently all posts made on the forum do NOT cache to Google. This is something we are pretty strongly against, as we believe a user should have the right to post, and understand their post will not potentially be on the World Wide Web forever.

However our stance on this may change at any time, at the forum owners’ discretion, to allow specific forums to be publically cached to Google.

 

CONTACT US

For any questions or notices, please use our CONTACT FORM and select “Privacy Enquiry”.

Please allow up to 30 days for a response to your query.

 

Last updated: MAY 2020