Housing Hub (ABN 14 663 443 758) is committed to keeping your information private. We follow all legal rules to make sure only people who are supporting you can see your information.

This document explains what we do with the information you give us. If you want to see our complete privacy policy, please visit our website. 

If you have any questions about how we will use your information, please call 1300 616 463 or email privacy@housinghub.org.au.

ℹ️ The information we collect

We only collect information that we need to provide a service. Examples of this information include:

• Your contact details like your name, address, phone number and email
• Information like your age, gender, family situation, disability and guardian details
• Details related to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) if applicable
• Information about your needs and preferences 
• Payment details if you're buying something from us
• Information about research activities you want to be part of our research

If you're applying for a job, we may also collect information about your qualifications, work history and more.

📬 How we collect your information

We mostly collect information directly from you, but we may also get it from other sources like your support coordinator if we think you would normally give this information to us. 

If you're under 18, make sure your parent or legal guardian is happy for you to share your information with us.

This is how we collect information:

• Talking to you or someone you trust, on the phone or in person
• When you fill out forms or answer questions online or on paper
• If you sign up to get emails or messages from us
• When you join discussions or groups with us
• If you tell us what kind of home you're interested in, or if someone else does this for you
• Sometimes other people or groups may give us information about you 
• When you visit our website
• If you buy something from us 

You do not have to give us your personal information, but if you don’t we might not be able to provide services or answer your queries.

If other people give us information about you, we'll only keep, use or share the information if it’s related to services you are seeking.  If someone else gives us information about you, we'll do our best to let you know. If they could only give us this information with your permission, we'll ask you if it’s ok for us to keep it.

🛠️ How we use your information

We'll only use your information if it is related to the service you are seeking. This could mean:

• Answering questions or feedback you sent us
• Providing the services you asked for, like checking if you can get housing, understanding what kind of housing you need, and helping you to apply for NDIS funding
• Giving you information, training or resources 
• Responding to questions you asked on our website about housing and other services
• Checking how well we are helping you, which might mean sharing your contact information with researchers 
• Telling you about other services we offer

🗣️ How we share information

Sometimes, we might need to share your personal information with others to help us provide our services or for legal reasons. Here are some examples of who we might share information with:

• Our Housing Hub staff -  but only if they need it to do their job
• Government agencies if needed to provide a service you have requested, or for legal reasons
• Housing providers or support professionals if we're helping you find housing 
• Agencies like the NDIS if we're helping you apply for funding
• Hospitals or care providers if we're helping you move out 
• Researchers 
• If you're applying to work with us, we might share information with your referees or other organisations helping us to hire
• Sometimes we may need to give your information to third parties to allow us to provide our services 

🌏 Sharing information with overseas services

We might use services (like Google Drive) from other countries to store or handle your information. These are called “cloud providers”. If we do, we'll make sure they have laws to protect your information.

When you share your information with us or agree for someone else to share it, this means you consent to your information being transferred like this. You can change your mind any time by contacting us, but this might affect the services we can offer you. We will let you know if that happens.

🍪 When you use our website

When you go to our website, we may collect information like  when you accessed the page, what pages you looked at and what you downloaded. We might also get details about where you searched from online and your computer's unique address called an IP address.

We also use cookies on our site. Cookies are small files that your web browser saves on your computer. They help us learn about how people use our website and how we can improve it. Cookies don't give us access to your computer or any personal information.

If you don't want us to use cookies, you can say no the first time you visit our site. You can also change your browser settings later to reject cookies. You can still use our site, but your experience might not be as good.

📧 When we may send information to you

We use your information to provide services and tell you about things you might like, such as other services or events. You can choose not to get these messages by opting out. But even if you opt out, we will still send you important information related to you.

🔒 Security of your information

Keeping your information safe is very important to us. We store your information safely and only those who give you our services can access it.

If we do not need your information any more, we will either delete it or make it hard for anyone to identify whose information it is. Sometimes we might have to keep it for legal reasons.

✅ Accuracy of your information

We try to make sure the information we have about you is correct and up to date. If you think something is wrong, you can tell us, and we will try to fix it.

😠 Access to your information and complaints

You can ask to see the information we have about you. We will try to give it to you, but there are some times when this is not possible. 

If you're not happy with how we handle your information or think we have breached the Privacy Act, you can let us know and we will do our best to fix it. We may ask for more information from you so we can respond. Our contact details are:

The Privacy Officer

Email: privacy@housinghub.org.au

Address: Housing Hub, PO Box 108, Box Hill Victoria 3128

Phone: 1300 616 463

You can also make a complaint to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC). You can contact the Australian Information Commissioner via telephone on 1300 363 992, by submitting a complaint or inquiry online at www.oaic.gov.au, or by writing to the OAIC at GPO Box 5218 Sydney NSW 2001.

👤 Fake names

Sometimes you might choose not to tell us who you are or use a fake name when you talk to us. But for most of our services we need to know who you are to help you. Sometimes the law says we can only work with people who tell us their real names.

🔁 Changes to this policy

We might change the Privacy Policy from time to time. Check back here to see if anything has changed.