When you sign up for a user account you provide two types of information:



publicly available information information available to both City of Melbourne and Harvest.





Publicly available information



Publicly available information is limited to your username and any comments you leave under that name in the forums or other feedback tools on Participate Melbourne.

Content that you post on the site publicly, will be able to be viewed by everyone who uses the site. Each post will contain your username and any publically available reports from consultations, and may include quotes from participants in forums, surveys and other consultation tools

Please note that the City of Melbourne is subject to the Freedom of Information Act 1982 (Vic) legislation. The Freedom of Information Act 1982 gives individuals and corporations a general right of access to documents held by Council. This includes documents created by Council, documents held by contracted service providers and documents supplied to Council by external organisations or individuals.





Information available to both City of Melbourne and Harvest Digital Planning includes:



all information from the sign-up form

comments, questions, stories, guestbook posts

survey responses, quick poll responses, map pins

general site activity such as document downloads, videos viewed, images viewed etc.

information on the technology used to access the site.





Hosting

Regardless of whether you are a registered user, we will retain any communications that you send to us in accordance with the Victorian Public Records Act 1973. The personal information you submit through Participate Melbourne will generally be hosted in Victoria and New South Wales but may be hosted on occasion in New Zealand. Please be aware that New Zealand may not have privacy protections substantially similar to Victoria.

Where data in Google Analytics and HotJar is stored offsite, we ensure this is depersonalised and cannot be used to identify specific individuals. Where data and information is collected via the site’s servers and tools, this is managed through our data security protocols and processes.







Policy updates

We may update the content of this Privacy Policy from time to time for any reason. The updated version of the Privacy Policy will apply to you as soon as it is posted on the website, so we suggest that each time you return to the consultation website you should review the Privacy Policy (and the Terms of Use).