How we handle your information.

This policy covers smarterportals.com, the Smarter Portals website. It explains what we collect when you use this site, why we collect it, and who else handles it.

It does not cover a Smarter Portals portal. If your organisation uses one of our portals, the information inside that portal belongs to your organisation and is handled under the written agreement between us and your organisation, not under this page.

Smarter Portals is an Australian business.

The enquiry form

The enquiry form is the only place on this site where we ask you for anything. It collects:

• your name, so we know who we are replying to (required)
• your work email address, so we can reply (required)
• your organisation (required)
• your phone number, if you would rather we called (optional)
• how many people you need to outfit, chosen from a list of ranges (optional)
• your message, which is whatever you choose to tell us (required)

The form also carries one hidden field. It is a spam trap: a person never sees it and never fills it in, so anything arriving with it filled is treated as automated. Those submissions are discarded on the spot. They are never emailed to us and nobody here reads them.

Request information

This site is reached over the internet, so the service that serves it sees the ordinary information any web request carries, including your IP address, the page you asked for, your browser’s user agent and the time. That is part of delivering a website. We do not collect it ourselves, we run no logging of our own, and we build no record of who visited. Cloudflare keeps its own operational records as our provider, as any host does.

When you submit the enquiry form, the small piece of code that receives it reads your IP address to count how many enquiries have arrived from it recently, and allows five in any ten minute window. Your IP address and that count are held in the memory of the code that is running, for as long as that code stays loaded, and nowhere else. Neither is ever written to storage, attached to your enquiry or sent to us.

What we do not want

Please do not send us personal information about anyone else through this form. We do not need staff records, student details, or health, financial or other sensitive information to answer an enquiry, and we would rather you did not put them in an email. If that kind of information becomes relevant later, it will be handled under a written agreement, not through a web form.

To answer your enquiry. That is the whole reason. We collect your name and email so we can reply, your organisation so we understand who we are talking to, and your message so we know what you need. The phone number and the size range are optional because a useful reply does not depend on them.

Giving us any of this is voluntary. If you would rather not use the form, email us at [email protected] instead. If the required fields are left empty the form will not send, because there would be nothing for us to reply to.

The Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) sets out the Australian Privacy Principles, which govern how personal information is collected, used, held, disclosed and corrected. The Act does not cover every business. Section 6D leaves some smaller businesses outside it.

We are not relying on that. Whether or not the Act currently applies to us, we handle personal information in line with the Australian Privacy Principles, and this policy is written to that standard. To be clear about what that means: we are telling you the standard we hold ourselves to, not claiming a status under the Act that we may not hold.

The reason is straightforward. Our first portal covers uniform ordering for schools, health organisations and other employers, so it holds information about their staff and their students. Those buyers are entitled to expect the standard from the beginning, rather than from the day a turnover threshold happens to be crossed.

Three services handle your enquiry. None of them is given your details for its own purposes.

• Cloudflare hosts and delivers this website. It terminates the HTTPS connection and serves the pages, which means it processes the request information described above, including your IP address. It also runs the code that receives your enquiry and passes it on.
• SMTP2GO delivers your enquiry to us as an email. It processes the content of the enquiry, which is everything you typed into the form, for the purpose of sending that one message.
• our business email provider runs the mailbox your enquiry arrives in. It holds the message for as long as we keep it, which makes it the service that holds your enquiry longest. We have not named it on this page. If your procurement process needs it named, email [email protected] and we will tell you.

That is the whole list. This site has no database behind it, no customer relationship management system, no mailing list tool and no advertising platform. Your enquiry becomes an email, it is read by the people here who answer enquiries, and it goes no further.

Your enquiry is an email. It is held in our mailbox, with the business email provider described above. If where that mailbox sits matters to your procurement process, email [email protected] and ask, and you will get a straight answer.

For the portals themselves, customer data is hosted in Australia. That is our default, and it is a deliberate choice, because it is what Australian schools and health organisations usually need to be able to say.

We can host in another region where a customer requires it. That would be agreed in writing with that customer, and it would not change the default for anyone else.

One honest qualification. Cloudflare and SMTP2GO both run international networks. Handing your enquiry to them means it is processed outside Australia, not merely carried through: Cloudflare runs the code that receives the form, and SMTP2GO holds the message while it delivers it. We would rather tell you that than imply the path is sealed inside the country. We give each of them only what the job needs, and only for that job.

An enquiry is an email in a mailbox. There is no separate database record to age out, so the honest answer is about the mailbox.

We keep enquiries while we are in contact with you, and for a reasonable period afterwards so that we have a record of what was asked and what we said. We have not set a fixed retention period, and we would rather say so here than publish a number we do not actually follow.

If you want your enquiry deleted, email [email protected] and say so. Deleting it means deleting the email and the reply thread, and we will do that. Backups and our email provider’s own records may keep a copy for a short period before they cycle out, and we would keep an enquiry longer only if we were required to, or if it related to a dispute between us. We would tell you if that applied.

Your details are not added to a marketing list. We do not have one, and an enquiry is not a subscription.

Email you receive from us will be a reply to your enquiry or a direct follow up about it. If we ever start sending marketing email, it will be something you choose to opt into separately, with your consent, our identity on every message and a working unsubscribe, as the Spam Act 2003 (Cth) requires.

We do not sell personal information. We do not rent, trade or disclose it to advertising networks, data brokers or anyone else for advertising purposes.

This site sets no cookies. It loads no analytics script, no tracking pixel, no advertising tag, no session recording and no fingerprinting into your browser. Nothing on these pages stores anything in your browser, and nothing reports your visit to a third party.

There is no cookie banner on this site because there is nothing to consent to.

The fonts, images, styles and scripts a page needs are all served from this site itself. Opening a page here does not make a request to another company’s servers on your behalf.

The site is served over HTTPS, so what you type into the form is encrypted between your browser and the service that receives it. The enquiry is then handed to SMTP2GO over an encrypted connection for delivery.

Access to the mailbox that receives enquiries is limited to the people here who need it.

We are not going to claim a certification we do not hold. If your procurement process needs our security arrangements reviewed, email [email protected] and ask. You will get a specific answer rather than a badge.

You can ask us what personal information we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. Email [email protected] and tell us what you need. We will respond within 30 days, which is the standard the Australian Privacy Principles set, and we will not charge you for asking.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, please tell us first. Email the same address and we will look into it and come back to you.

If we do not resolve it, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, the national privacy regulator. The OAIC asks that you raise the matter with the organisation first, which is why the step above matters. You can lodge a complaint at oaic.gov.au/privacy/privacy-complaints or call the OAIC on 1300 363 992.

If personal information we hold is lost, or is accessed or disclosed without authorisation, we will act on it as soon as we become aware of it: work out what happened, contain it, and assess whether it is likely to result in serious harm to anyone.

If it is likely to result in serious harm, we will tell the people affected and notify the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner as soon as we reasonably can. The Notifiable Data Breaches scheme sets out that process for the organisations it binds. We intend to follow it whether or not it binds us, because the point of it is that you find out.

If this policy changes, the new version is published on this page and the date at the top changes with it. There is no archive of earlier versions and no notification list, so if this matters to your procurement process, check the date here.

A change applies from the day it is published. We will not apply a change retrospectively in a way that contradicts what this page said at the time you sent your enquiry.