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Privacy

Online Privacy Statement
Australian Institute of Early Childhood Studies respects our customers’ right to privacy online. We hold your detailed customer information in confidence.

Asking for your information
We will sometimes ask customers for personal information such as your name, address, e-mail address, occupation, hobbies and other details. Providing us your information will simply help us offer products and services that we think you’d like to hear about. When you choose to give personal information to us over the Internet that our business partners or we may request, we will endeavour to inform you how we will use the information.

When we ask for personal information for any reason, we will provide a link to this policy statement to make our intentions clear.

Personal Information Privacy
Australian Institute of Early Childhood Studies will take all appropriate steps to keep your personal information confidential. Those steps include limiting access to customer information databases, communicating this policy statement to all Australian Institute of Early Childhood Studies employees and establishing and enforcing penalties for violating this statement.

Australian Institute of Early Childhood Studies will not sell, rent, or give away our customers’ personal information to other companies for use in selling others’ products or services. When we do contract with another company to market or advertise products or services for us, we will insist on binding agreements from those companies protecting our customer information. We will vigorously enforce all privacy agreements we have with other companies.

We gather personal information from our customers so we can better develop our relationship with those customers. Occasionally, we seek customer comments on our products and services. These comments allow us to determine which products and services our customers should be made aware of based on their specific needs.

We will communicate with customers via e-mail or other online delivery devices only if the customer agrees to receive those communications. Customers, who believe they are receiving our communications in error or no longer desire to receive them, should inform us and we will remove those customers’ names from our mailing lists. Australian Institute of Early Childhood Studies will be judicious in the use of e-mail and paper mail to communicate with customers.

We will, at all times, put ourselves in the place of the recipients of our mail and treat our customers as we ourselves would like to be treated.

Australian Institute of Early Childhood Studies has teamed with others to provide our customers with enhanced Internet services. In providing such services, our business partners also may request personal information from our customers. We prohibit these business partners from selling or giving away our customer information and we require them to have a posted Privacy Policy, so that our customers may review it before providing personal information to our business partners.

Order Information Privacy and Credit Card Security
We currently use the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol to safeguard your information, including your credit card number, during online transactions. None of the tens of thousands of people, who have made purchases through Gateway’s Web site using SSL, have reported to us fraudulent use of their credit card as a result of their online order. We believe SSL to be a very safe encryption method, but we are always looking for even more secure encryption methods to safeguard information sent online. Our server will run detection software to help ensure you are using a secure browser and your information is secure when you check out. If our browser determines you are not using a secure browser, a message will appear at checkout.

For more information on SSL technology, please click here. [link to SSL company]

For your protection, never put your credit card number or other sensitive information in unencrypted e-mail. In the extremely unlikely event that we ever do suspect a customer’s credit card number has been intercepted, we will immediately notify the customer.

Cookies
Australian Institute of Early Childhood Studies currently uses “cookies” on our site. Our cookies tag each visitor’s browser with a random, unique number. The cookie simply assigns a number and does not disclose any personal information about the person using the browser. By noting where these uniquely numbered browsers go on our site, we can study traffic patterns and improve our site. To learn more about cookies, click here. [link to cookies page]

Contact Us
If you have any questions about this privacy statement, the practices of this site, or your dealings with Australian Institute of Early Childhood Studies, please contact our Internet Coordinator. If you wish to update or correct the personal information about you held by Australian Institute of Early Childhood Studies, please call (07) 3801 3962.

Internet Cookies
When it comes to privacy on the Internet, some tiny cookies can brew up big discussion.

Internet cookies are small strings of text placed on users’ hard drives during the exchange of data that happens when a browser points to a Web site. The fact that an Internet site can place something on a hard drive makes some people really edgy. At first glance, it may seem like a clandestine move to get all the secrets stored on our hard drives. But cookies aren’t evil. Gateway’s cookies have no way of disclosing your name or any personal information.

They just use random data tags to identify you as a distinct, unnamed visitor to our Internet site.

So what are cookies used for?
Cookies can actually make your Internet experience better. Many sites, especially those that offer electronic commerce, use cookies. For one thing, cookies can store a password or ID that some Internet sites require, freeing you from typing them in every time you land on the site.

They can also remember preferences you enter and then tailor a site to each user’s unique tastes. Many sites also have cookies that create “shopping carts” to hold all the items you select for purchase. That lets you pay for them all at once.

What does Australian Institute of Early Childhood Studies use cookies for?
Australian Institute of Early Childhood Studies uses cookies to track where users go on our site. Our cookies embed a random identifying number on each user’s browser. Then we note where your number shows up on our site. That data lets us determine what content people like and where to put things to make them easy to find.

The Australian Institute of Early Childhood Studies cookie is like your neighbourhood
Our cookie lets us do all the things that are good practice in real stores. It lets us track what parts of our store are the most popular, just as store employees can visually watch traffic patterns and analyse the day’s sales results. But our cookie actually gives us less information than a real store owner would get, since it can’t send us your name or address, gender, age or other things a store owner often knows.

Your browser can detect cookies
Many popular browsers can be made to flash you a message when a Web site asks to place a cookie and also ask if you want to accept the cookie. The most current versions can automatically disable cookies without first asking you to decline the cookie. The function is found under Edit|Preferences|Advanced in Netscape Communicator and View|Internet Options|Advanced in Microsoft Internet Explorer.

If you set your browser to ask you every time we attempt to set the cookie and say no, it’s very likely the site will ask you over and over again if it can place a cookie every time you make a move. If you set your browser to alert you to cookies, you’ll quickly find out how common cookies are. Most browsers will automatically accept cookies if the browser is not set to alert you to cookie requests. Some newer browsers, however, also have a feature that automatically declines attempts to set cookies without notifying you.

Australian Institute of Early Childhood Studies sets one cookie
We tag your browser when you first hit our site. But, if you refuse our request to place a cookie, we’ll keep asking to place one every time you move through our site. It’s not that we set a lot of cookies, we’ve just programmed our site to set the cookie whenever an untagged user moves to any screen. We do that because not every user comes through the front door.

Some link in to specific parts of our site from banners, bookmarks or by typing a distinct URL.

So we check for our cookie whenever a browser hits any page and try to set the cookie if you don’t already have one.

Sharing our cookie policy
Australian Institute of Early Childhood Studies has decided to use a cookie to track user traffic patterns on our site. Our cookies simply identify your browser with a number so we can separate out unique users. A lot of sites use cookies, but not a lot of them explain why. We want you to know where we stand on cookies, how ours work and what we use the resulting data for. If our policies on cookies change, you’ll be the first to know.