Privacy Statement

 

The Australian Homestay Network (AHN) Privacy Statement describes how AHN and its subsidiaries treat personal information when you use related services. To understand how we treat the information you give us as you use the AHN System, it is important that you read and this statement.

Personal Information

  • Guests/Public. You can access the public site, as well as public member information without having an AHN Account. You can also contact us without having an AHN Account.
  • Member Account Access. Certain other activities on AHN—like beginning a Homestay application as a host or student, uploading photos and other information, leaving feedback, and using the internal messaging/email feature—require you to have an AHN Account. We ask for some personal information when you create an AHN account, which includes your email address and a password, this information is used to protect your account from unauthorised access. An AHN account allows you to access many of our services that require registration.
  • Usage Information. We record information about your usage, such as when you use AHN, messages sent and received through internal messages/email, as well as information you display or click on within the AHN system (including system alerts and flows, as well as custom user pages).  
  • Content Uploaded to Site. Any personal information or photo content that you voluntarily disclose online (on the discussion boards, chat areas, etc.) becomes publicly available and can be collected and used by others.
  • “Private” Content.  Certain pages and information fields are identified as “private”, such as within personal profile pages, and this information is used only by AHN certified supervisors under normal operations without prejudice, and will only be disclosed to external parties for the purpose of ensuring that your application can be successfully processed. The information will not be disclosed to any external unrelated party.

Information Uses

  • Your account name (not your email address) is displayed to other users when you upload photos or send messages through the AHN Site and other users can contact you through messages and discussion board comments. Any photos that you submit to AHN may be redistributed through the Internet and other media channels and may be viewed by the general public.
  • We do not use your email address or other personally identifiable information to send commercial or marketing messages without your consent.  We may, however, use your email address without further consent for non-marketing or administrative purposes (such as notifying you of major AHN Site changes or for customer service purposes).
  • We use certain non-personally identifiable information (such as anonymous user usage data, cookies, IP addresses, browser type, etc.) to improve the quality and design of the AHN Site and to create new features, promotions, functionality and services by storing, tracking, analysing and processing user preferences and trends, as well as user activity and communications.
  • We use cookies, clear gifs and log file information to: (a) store information so that you will not have to re-enter it during your visit or the next time you visit the AHN Sites; (b) provide custom, personalised content and information; (c) monitor the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns; (d) monitor aggregate metrics such as total number of visitors, pages viewed, etc.; and (e) track your entries, submissions and status in promotions, sweepstakes and contests.

Public Information

  • When you create an account on the AHN site, some information regarding your account and your account activity will be provided to other Users of the site. This may include the date you opened your account, the date you last logged in to your account.
  • Your account name (not your email address) is displayed to other Users when you engage in certain activity on the site, such as uploading photos, using the discussion forum or sending messages via the internal messaging/email feature.
  • You can also choose to add personal information that will be visible to other Users on your public profile. This may include a profile picture, your name, gender, relationship status or other details.

Your Choices

  • You may, of course, decline to submit personally identifiable information through the AHN Site, in which case you can still view publicly accessible information on the guest pages, but AHN will not be able to provide certain services to you, such as facilitating a Homestay Placement.
  • You may update or correct your personal profile information and email preferences at any time by visiting your profile pages within your member account
  • You can control the information that is available to other Users at any time by editing your account and the features included on your profile pages.

Information Sharing

AHN only shares personal information with other companies or individuals outside of AHN in the following limited circumstances:

  • We have your consent. We require opt-in consent for the sharing of any sensitive personal information.
  • We provide such information to our subsidiaries, affiliated companies or other trusted businesses or persons for the purpose of processing personal information on your behalf. We require that these parties agree to process such information based on our instructions and in compliance with this Policy and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures.
  • We have a good faith belief that access, use, preservation or disclosure of such information is reasonably necessary to (a) facilitate the success of your application and involvement with AHN (b) satisfy any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request, (c) enforce applicable Terms of Service, including investigation of potential violations thereof, (d) detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues, or (e) protect against imminent harm to the rights, property or safety of AHN, its users or the public as required or permitted by law.
  • We may share with third parties certain pieces of aggregated, non-personal information, such as the number of users who viewed a particular page, for example, or how many users clicked on a particular advertisement. Such information does not identify you individually.

Third-party Advertisers, Links to Other Sites

AHN allows other organisations to upload custom pages that link directly to AHN through your member homepage.  You should consult the respective privacy policies of these third-party websites for more information on their practices and for instructions on how to opt out of certain practices. AHN’s privacy policy does not apply to, and we cannot control the activities of, such other websites.  

Changes to this policy

Please note that this Privacy Policy may change from time to time. We will not reduce your rights under this Policy without your explicit consent, and we expect most such changes will be minor. Regardless, we will post any Policy changes on this page and, if the changes are significant, we will provide a more prominent notice (including, for certain services, email notification of Policy changes).