Privacy Statement
Queensland has privacy legislation that applies to the Queensland public sector - the Information Privacy Act 2009 (IP Act). the IP Act contains privacy principles that set out how agencies may and must handle personal information. Personal information means any information about an identifiable person.
The Whitsunday Regional Council's Privacy Notice refers to details of the types of personal information that we hold and how we handle this information.

Website privacy and security statement
Whitsunday regional Council is committed to protecting the privacy of our website users. We understand and appreciate that visitors to and users of this website are concerned about their privacy and the confidentiality and security of information that they provide to us.

As a general rule, we do not collect information that can directly identify you when you visit our site. When you visit our site to read or download information, our we measurement tool and Internet Services Providers record the following information only for our statistical purposes:

• your server and IP address
• the name of the top level domain (for example, .gov, .com, .edu, .au)
• the type of browser used
• the date and time that you accessed the site
• the pages accessed and documents downloaded
• the previous site that you visited.

These statistics provide information to assist us to make improvements to the content and structure of our website.
We collect personal information via online forms or by email communications for the purposes of, for example:

• Subscriptions to electronic mailing lists and RSS feeds
• Subscriptions to calendar alerts
• Subscriptions to weather and disaster event alerts
• Notification of tenders and requests for quotes

Email correspondence
Your email address details will not be added to a mailing list nor will we disclose these details to third parties without your consent, unless required by law. Email messages may be monitored by our information technology staff for system trouble-shooting and maintenance purposes.

Cookies
Cookies are text files that a website can transfer to your computer when you access information on that site. Cookies allow websites to recognise you as you browse their website.
Whitsunday Regional Council uses Google Analytics to gather statistics about how their website is accessed. Google Analytics uses cookies to gather information for the purpose of providing statistical reporting. The cookies do not collect information that can directly identify you.
The information generated by the cookie about your use of the website will be transmitted to and stored by Google on servers located outside Australia. No personally identifying information is recorded or provided to Google.
Information gathered using Google Analytics cookie is used for the purpose of determining:

• the number of visitors to Whitsunday Regional Council's website
• how visitors arrive at Whitsunday Regional Council's website, for example:
  •  did they type the address directly in;
  • follow a link from another webpage; or
  • arrive via a search engine?
• the number of times each page is viewed and for how long
• time and date of visits
• geographical location of visitors
• information about what browsers are used to view Whitsunday Regional Council's website and the operating system of the computers or devices
• whether these browsers support Java and Flash
• the speed of the user's internet connection

This information is used to refine and improve Whitsunday Regional Council's online service delivery and in turn the community's online experience.

Public Records
E-mail correspondence, blog comments and information provided via web forms can constitute public records and can be retained as required by the Public Records Act 2002 and other relevant legislation.

Use and disclosure 
Council will only use personal information collected via our website for the purposes for which it was given to us and/or for related, internal management purposes. Council does not disclose your personal information to other government agencies or organisations. Go to our Privacy Notice for further information
  
Security
We take strong precautions to protect the personal information that we hold concerning you from loss, unauthorised access, use, modification or disclosure and against other misuse. However, please be aware that we do not provide a mechanism for securing the transmission of information across the Internet.
This website contains links to other websites. Whitsunday Regional Council is not responsible for the content and privacy practices of other websites.