Privacy Statement

Many people have concerns about providing their personal details to an organisation when they sign up for an e-mail list online. We hope we can address some of your concerns here.

Australians who live in the United States, in particular, find that within weeks of moving to the United States, they receive significant quantities of junk snail mail and junk e-mail. It is clear that often e-mail address lists and other contact details are sold commercially for marketing purposes, and that little heed is paid to various privacy laws.

The Southern Cross Group is a non-profit organisation run by volunteers. Our purpose is to work for the removal of legal, administrative and technical barriers which hinder the mobility of Australians in the global economy. We do ask for some basic information about you when you sign up to our e-mail list, and this is used solely in order to facilitate our work. For example, it enables us to reach Australians in particular countries or with particular issues for special campaigns which may not be relevant to all overseas Australians.

From time to time, in submissions we make to government or decision makers, we may refer to particular case histories related to us by our members, which demonstrate the unfairness of a particular law or policy and its negative impact on the expatriate community. In those instances, we never use the name of the person concerned, and we change other details so that the person concerned cannot be identified.

We give you our undertaking that we never sell or give away your personal contact details to any other entity. Only a few SCG Committee Members will have access to the information you provide when you sign up to our e-mail list, and this is tightly controlled.

Businesses that contact us and want to buy our address list so that they can market products and services to Australians overseas are told that our address list is not available, and encouraged to take out an advertisement on our website for a small fee.

Other non-commercial organisations that contact us and want to use our address list are also never provided with it. If we think, after discussions with the organisation concerned, that the information they wish to transmit to Australians overseas would be useful and relevant for our membership, we will circulate an e-bulletin ourselves to you providing you with their information. For example, government or academic institutions doing research on Australians overseas and reasons for emigration from Australia would fall into this category.

You can unsubscribe yourself from our e-mail bulletin list at any time using the link which you will find at the bottom of each message we send to List Members. You can also use the same link to update your personal information if your e-mail address changes, for example. Other List Members cannot see your e-mail address when a message is sent out to everyone on the list. Anyone who hits the "reply" button to respond to one of our messages will have their reply sent only to the Southern Cross Group. It will not go to everyone on the list. We keep our e-bulletins to a minimum and only contact you when we have new information on an issue we are working on. We take care not to flood your inbox.

If you provide us with data about yourself, you may contact us at any time and request us to delete and destroy all data which we hold about you, and we will do so.

In the course of 2002 the Southern Cross Group hopes to become an honorary member of the Internet Industry Association. Our website is hosted in Australia. We will be subscribing to the IIA's new Privacy Code of Practice and displaying the compliance seal on our website at that time.