Privacy

The Emergency Alert website is an initiative of the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) and is administered by the State of Victoria.

The State of Victoria has a firm commitment to privacy in accordance with the Information Privacy Act 2000 (Vic), Information Privacy Principles and the Website Privacy Guidelines issued by the Office of the Victorian Privacy Commissioner. This statement discloses our information gathering and dissemination practices for this site.

The Commonwealth, States and Territories are subject to relevant Commonwealth, State and Territory Privacy Acts. Links to Commonwealth, State and Territory Privacy Acts can be found on the Australian Government Privacy Commissioner's website - http://www.privacy.gov.au/law/states (External link).

Information logged

When you visit this site, our server logs the following information which is provided by your browser for statistical purposes only:

The type of browser and operating system you are using
Your top level domain name (for example .com, .gov, .au, .uk etc)
The address of the referring site (for example, the previous site that you visited)
Your server's IP address (a number which is unique to the machine through which you are connected to the Internet: usually one of your service provider's machines).

In addition, our server logs the following information:

The date and time of your visit
The address of the pages accessed and the documents downloaded

All of this information we use only for statistical analysis or systems administration purposes. No attempt will be made to identify users or their browsing activities, except in the unlikely event of an investigation where a law enforcement agency may exercise a warrant.

Electronic mail addresses

We will only record your e-mail address if you send us a message. It will only be used for the purpose for which you provide it, and will not be added to a mailing list unless you request that this be done. We will not disclose it without your consent.

Cookies

A cookie is an electronic token that is passed to your browser and your browser passes it back to the server whenever a page is sent to you.

Our server generates one cookie which is used to keep track of the pages you have accessed while using our server. The cookie allows you to page back and forwards through the web site and return to pages you have already visited. The cookie exists only for the time you are accessing our server.

Searches

Search terms that you enter when using our search engine are collected, but are not associated with any other information that we collect. We use these search terms to ascertain what people are looking for at our site, and to improve the services that we provide.