Market & Communications Research (MCR) (ABN 75 057 292 207) respects and upholds your rights under the Australian Privacy Principles contained in the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) (“Privacy Act”). MCR also adheres to the Privacy (Market and Social Research) Code 2021.
This Privacy Policy for MCR lets you know what personal information of yours we hold, what we do with it, who we will disclose it to and how you can access the personal information we hold about you. You can also find out here how to change inaccurate personal information and how to opt out of receiving communications from us.
The information MCR collects may include name, telephone number, email address, mailing address, employment status, occupation, income, gender and age, and your opinions, attitudes, views and perceptions in relation to the organisations, brands, products, services, advertising and other communications that our research may be about.
When providing personal information you have the option of remaining anonymous or using a pseudonym to be identified by. However, in certain circumstances, such as where we receive your contact details from a third party or where the research data itself may potentially allow for identification, this may not be practicable.
Depending on the nature of the research we conduct, we may also collect sensitive information from you, including membership of trade associations, health information and ethnic origins. Sensitive information will only be collected with your prior consent and only if it is directly related to, or reasonably necessary for, the research we conduct.
MCR will generally collect your personal information directly from you in the course of you participating in our research and/or surveys. However, we may also from time to time collect personal information about you from third parties, such as our clients and commercial providers of lists of potential candidates for research. If so, we will inform you as soon as practicable of this collection and its circumstances.
We will only use and disclose your personal information for the purpose of conducting our research and in accordance with this Privacy Policy. We will not use or disclose your personally identifiable information for the purpose of advertising, promotions or direct marketing activities. If you declined to participate in our research, we may use your personal information to re-contact you for a research purpose if we have valid reasons to believe a genuine research concern warrants such re-contact. If you have participated in our research, we will only re-contact you if you were informed of this or we have valid reasons to believe a genuine research concern warrants such re-contact.
We will not disclose any personally identifiable research information we collect from you unless we have your express prior consent. Otherwise, we will only report the information you provide in a form that will not personally identify you. We will not disclose any personal information or personally identifiable research information to a third party for a purpose other than conducting our research unless we have your express prior consent or are required to do so by an Australian law or court/tribunal order. We do not have any arrangements in place that involve the hosting or storage overseas of any data we collect in our research.
You have the right to request access to any personal information we hold about you. You can request this information by contacting the Privacy Officer using the details listed below. Where we hold information that you are entitled to access, we will respond to your request in a reasonable time and endeavour to provide you with a suitable range of choices as to how access is provided (eg emailing or mailing it to you). A fee may be charged to cover the cost of retrieval. However, this fee will not be excessive and will only apply to the facilitation of your request. If at any time you believe that personal information we hold about you is incorrect, incomplete or inaccurate, then you may request amendment of it and we will either amend the information or make a record of your comment, as we think appropriate.
If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy or believe that we have at any time failed to keep one of our commitments to you to handle your personal information in the manner required by the Privacy Act, the Australian Privacy Principles and the Privacy (Market and Social Research) Code 2021, then we ask that you contact us using any of the following contact details: Privacy Officer [email protected]. We will respond and advise whether we agree with your complaint or not. If we do not agree, we will provide reasons. If we do agree, we will advise what, if any, action we consider it appropriate to take in response. If you are still not satisfied after having contacted us and given us a reasonable time to respond, then we suggest that you contact the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner by: Phone: 1300 363 992 (local call cost, but calls from mobile and pay phones may incur higher charges).
MCR will destroy, delete or de-identify your personal information as soon as practicable once it is no longer needed for the purpose for our research. However, we may in certain circumstances be required by law to retain your personal information after our research has been completed. In this case your personal information will continue to be protected in accordance with this Policy. If we destroy or delete personal information we will do so by taking reasonable steps and using up-to-date techniques and processes.
MCR will take reasonable steps to protect your personally identifiable information. We will also take reasonable steps to protect such information from loss, misuse and unauthorised access, use, modification, disclosure, alteration or destruction. However, you should keep in mind that the transmission of information over the internet is not completely secure or error-free. In particular, emails may not be secure, and you should therefore take special care in deciding what information you send to us via email.
In this policy “personal information” has the same meaning as under the Privacy Act. We may change this policy from time to time. Although we intend to observe this Privacy Policy at all times, it is not legally binding on MCR in any way. From time to time we may regard it as necessary or desirable to act outside the policy. MCR may do so, subject only to any other applicable contractual rights you have and any statutory rights you have under the Privacy Act or other applicable legislation.
