How we protect your data
Consumer Information Portal
As a responsible marketing services provider, we are committed to ensuring the interests of consumers are at the heart of what we do. This encompasses both the safeguards we have in place to protect your personal data and our ethical approach to how your data is used in a marketing context to ensure you experience no detriment or harm because of our activities.
Allowing your data to be used means you're more likely to receive marketing and advertising for the items you're interested in. It doesn't mean you receive more advertising, just more relevant advertising.
But there are other ways organisations use data that can benefit you.
It helps ensure organisations’ databases are accurate and up to date so you don't receive mail for people who have lived in your property before you, or your name isn't misspelled on letters you receive.
It makes organisations more efficient as they can better target their services, reducing their costs which allows them to be more competitive. And more competitive businesses tend to offer better products and fairer pricing to you, helping you save money.
It also keeps the internet and its content free. We consume huge amounts of information online; from news, to entertainment, social media, and video. Online content providers receive revenue from advertisers, which means they can afford to provide their content for free.
Relevant marketing can help millions of people access essential, everyday information — as well as services they would otherwise be charged for. Here are just some benefits of sharing your data to allow relevant marketing to be done:
Relevant and personalised communication
When organisations have information about you, they can try to ensure the offers and services marketed to you are relevant and personalised. This allows brands to communicate with you at the right time, through the right channel, on the right device.
For example, you can receive offers to help you save money on the things you buy often, or recommendations to encourage you to try something new. And online customers who share their personal information can enjoy highly personalised product suggestions, faster checkouts, and membership reward programmes.
This means individuals no longer have to be bombarded by marketing communications irrelevant to them, which as we all know, can be both annoying and frustrating.
Fair pricing
We all want to pay the right price for the right product, and no-one likes paying over the odds. Good marketing creates healthy competition among brands, resulting in fair pricing for the products and services you pay for.
Keeping content free
We consume huge amounts of content online, from news and entertainment to social media. Advertising allows these online content providers to generate revenue and provide these services for free, so we can all enjoy them.
Creating choice and meeting demand
Relevant marketing helps organisations meet their customers’ demand as well as fuelling innovation and technological advances. For example, market research leads to better product development targeting the needs and wants of you, the consumer. Marketing helps smaller organisations grow, creating a healthy competitive environment which benefits you and society overall through its economic impact.
Better Experiences
Organisations use data to understand you better. This helps them provide great customer service and build trust in the way your data is used. This can involve making sure their brand resonates with you, or designing websites that are easier and simpler to navigate.
Giving consumers local services
In specific geographical areas our data helps retail or leisure organisations offer relevant products and services that reflect what the local community likes to buy.
Efficiency in public services
For local authorities, the government and emergency services, data can have a crucial impact on how resources are allocated. By properly understanding individuals, households or the geographic area, authorities can direct scarce funds towards those most in need. And public service messages can be targeted at the most likely ‘at risk’ groups.
We take every measure possible to be sure our products and services will benefit you.
Our ethical approach to marketing
We always put you first - protecting your data privacy rights is our priority.
How?
We're also members of relevant industry bodies such as the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). We also actively participate in providing industry feedback via face-to-face sessions and content submissions as requested by The Privacy Commissioner. By following industry codes of practice that always put the individual first, we can ensure we're meeting high standards when it comes to making sure our activities are right for you.
We comply with industry best practice
We seek to align to best practices laid down by the Regulatory & Industry bodies. Plus, we use controls like industry suppression lists to check our data is accurate and that any marketing preferences you have expressed are respected.
We have processes of due diligence when choosing suppliers and clients to work with, and we continually monitor these relationships. We only work with organisations who meet our high standards of compliance with data protection requirements.
This is to make sure that we don’t use personal data in a way that could cause harm to you. We require both suppliers and clients to use appropriate security measures to safeguard your information.
We use the minimum data required
Often referred to in data protection regulation as “data minimisation”, we ensure that only the minimum amount of personal information needed for processing purposes is collected by us.
We do this through measures such as:
Your data is secure here in Australia and overseas
Experian is based in Australia. However, we and our clients also operate elsewhere in the world and may access your personal information from these locations.
We take a number of steps to ensure that your data is kept safe and secure, by applying strict safeguards when transferring your data overseas to third parties or Experian Group companies:
We only keep your data for a reasonable time
We keep your personal information for as long as we need to provide marketing services for our clients, and no longer.
We constantly protect your data and your rights
At Experian we have a number of processes running through our whole business to ensure we protect your data and rights.
Our Compliance team and our Product and Solutions Review Boards consider the impact of any use of personal data in our products and services before it takes place. This is so any potential negative impacts to you, can be identified and eliminated.
And we regularly run audits of all our marketing activities, giving us independent assurance that data protection and privacy principles are adhered to and that consumers are being treated fairly.
Finally, everyone at Experian must participate in regular data protection training.
We use full refreshes of data, checking the quality and accuracy of that data to ensure it is accurate and up to date, to make sure our clients aren't sending marketing communications to people who have opted out, have moved address, or to deceased individuals.
We constantly assess the analytical techniques we use to build our models and segmentations to ensure that the results are as accurate as possible.
We're transparent about your data and how we use it
This Consumer Information Portal contains lots of information to provide transparency on topics such as what we do with personal data, where this comes from, and how you can exercise your data rights.
We will continue to evolve the Portal in line with consumer, industry and regulator feedback to ensure on-going and enhanced future transparency.