Privacy and Confidentiality

SaaS and Managed Services privacy and confidentiality.

A common question from prospective customers is how does outsourcing a service like email filtering and hosting impact their and their clients privacy and confidentiality. This is often embodied in the question 'Do you read my email?'.

The short answer is 'No we don't'. Best efforts are taken to ensure people can't read your email or access your data stored on our services. With billions of emails transiting the systems every month it would be very time consuming to try!

As a provider of hosting and hosted security services we're acutely aware of the privacy and security issues that customers are concerned about. Like any ISP, Telco or service provider Cleartext makes best efforts to ensure that your 'internet traffic' or data is not accessible to prying eyes, some of the ways we do this are;

• Hosting our equipment in secure data centers, with biometric and swipe card access control, closed circuit TV monitoring and other security measures.
• Using strong passwords for online management portals and only allowing access to systems to authorised persons.
• Keeping all systems updated, patched and current.
• Ensuring all Cleartext suppliers, staff and contractors are fully briefed on the expectations our customers have in these areas.

Apart from our own work in this area we also comply with our governments recommendations and regulations. The Australian Office of the Privacy Commissioner suggests that businesses can make six statements about their privacy policy, here are the suggested practical terms and our statements.

In practical terms complying with the Privacy Act means:

Telling people we collect personal information and what we will do with it;
We collect personal information for the purposes of following up an inquiry made be you via forms on our web site, by email, fax or telephone. We use this information to provide information on products or services that you have shown an interest in or that we may reasonably expect you would be interested in given the nature or our own and your business interests. We will give you a reasonable mechanism to opt out of direct marketing communications.

Only using personal information about people in ways that they might expect;
We only collect enough information to be able to contact you by telephone, electronic messaging(e.g. email), fax, or the postal service. We do not collect information that is confidential such as date of birth, nationality, financial or other sensitive personal information. We do not pass this information on to other parties for use that may be outside of your wishes.

If we no longer need your information or you request that we destroy it we may depersonalise information for the purpose of business analysis. This will be done in such a way so as the information we retain cannot be linked to your own identity.

Not passing personal information on without telling people;
We do not pass the information we gather to other individuals or organisations outside of the Cool Bananas Ventures companies, trading entities (eg. Cleartext) or our immediate business partners/sub contractors without your consent. When this information is passed on it is with the purpose of engaging in business activity that may be reasonably expected to be of interest to you.

Giving people the chance to see any information you hold about them if they ask;
We will comply with all reasonable requests to disclose to you the information we may gather about you as long as we are able to confirm your identity prior to the release of the information.

Keeping personal information safe; and
We use best efforts to keep your personal information secure at all times and follow industry best practice to secure our IT networks and data storage systems.

If people ask, telling them how you handle personal information in your business.
Your personal information is stored in a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system and/or other similar systems. It may be contained in individual files such as spreadsheets, documents that are quotes and invoices also stored on our computer systems or as paper documents in files. These systems are only available to authorised persons.

Privacy complaints
If you have questions or a complaint about the way we approach your privacy please contact us directing your communication to the Privacy Officer.