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Big Volcano® Privacy Policy
Thank you for visiting Big Volcano® Tourism Marketing & Media's (here-after Big Volcano®) web site.
bigvolcano.com.au is located at and primarily accessed via the URL at https://www.bigvolcano.com.au.
You may also reach this web site via the following domain names: bigvolcano.net, bigvolcano.net.au, sunrisecoastncountry.com.au, travelbiz.com.au, and visitbigvolcano.com. This privacy policy also applies to these urls until otherwise notified.
Map © Locality map by David Palmer
This privacy statement applies only to information collected by this website, and covers privacy requirements for EEA GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and ePR (e-Privacy Regulation), California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and the Australian Privacy Act 1988.
Updated: 20 January 2023. Removed Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. Added Ko-fi.com donations platform. Updated MailChimp's Cookie Statement, Global Privacy Policy and Terms of Use links, Updated Google services privacy and cookies links, Updated Meta (Facebook) Privacy and Cookies links. Updated Twitter Privacy and Website links.
Last modified: 5 January 2020. Previous version.
Personal Information
When you visit and navigate around our web site (Big Volcano®) and communicate with us via the internet or our web site, we don't collect Personally Identifiable Information (PII) about you unless you provide us with that information, via email, newsletter sign-up, telephone, personal messaging, other communication services, or in person.
Any non-public personal information that you may provide will be used solely for the purpose stated when it is collected.
By “Personally Identifiable Information (PII),” we mean data that is unique to an individual; such as your name, contact e-mail address, residential/postal address, telephone number, and for businesses, also your operating business contact numbers, your business name (ACN/RBN), and Australian Business Number (ABN - tax file number).
We may request such PII from you in order to respond to your questions or deliver a product or service.
Big Volcano® will not sell, license, transmit or disclose this information outside of Big Volcano® unless (a) it is expressly authorized by you, (b) it is necessary so Big Volcano® contractors or agents can provide goods and/or services, or (c) it is required by law. We will inform you of this unless it is illegal for us to do so, or we are unable to contact you personally. In all cases, we will disclose the information consistent with applicable laws and regulations and expect the recipient to protect the information and use it only for the purpose it was provided.
We welcome your comments or questions about our web site and have provided an e-mail feedback link. We will direct your comments and questions to the person most capable of addressing your query or feedback.
Please note: your e-mail is probably a non-encrypted Internet e-mail communication, so it is capable of being intercepted by other Internet users without your knowledge and permission, while the message is in transit. For that reason, please don't use e-mail to send information to us that you consider confidential.
Collecting Information
When you visit bigvolcano.com.au, we collect some automatically generated (first party) general information which is used to track web site usage trends and patterns, so we can better understand and improve areas of our web site. This may include:
- Your server IP address
- Your top level domain (for example .com, .gov, .net .au, etc.)
- The pages you accessed and the documents downloaded
- The date and time of your visit to the site
- The previous site you visited
- The type of browser you are using
This information doesn't identify you personally and won't be combined with information that can be traced back to a specific individual. It provides us with statistical information which helps to analyse and improve Big Volcano® services e.g. which content is most popular, which areas may need improvement or modification, and other miscellaneous technical details.
We also use 3rd party services of Search by Sitelevel, HotJar and Google Analytics for this purpose. (See below.)
Cookies
A "cookie" is a small file that is sent to your browser when you visit a web site. It is stored on your computer and contains information on how you navigate a web site. It is not a computer program and can't read the data on your computer or perform any operations. The cookie does not extract personal information about you, such as your name or address.
Big Volcano® does not use cookies. However, we do have relationships with third party services which provide web site search, analytics and statistics information. We also participate in affiliate programmes that provide web site visitors with real time accommodation, tourist attractions and tour booking options.
These third party providers do use cookies, as described below.
Third Party Services
From time to time, we may use other 3rd party providers to give site visitors (you!) the opportunity to offer us immediate feedback about our site (e.g. "Did you find the information you were looking for?"). These functions are usually javascript enabled. If you have javascript disabled in your browser, they shouldn't appear.
Such services are voluntary, anonymous and no personally identifying information is collected by us, unless you provide us with such details. We use this visitor feedback to improve our web site user experience and performance. Cookies generated by these services generally expire automatically after 365 days.
Search by Sitelevel
Big Volcano® uses services from Sitelevel.com to provide site search capability on bigvolcano.com.au. Single session cookies only are generated by Sitelevel, to provide agregate reports about any searches performed and results, if any, up to 30 days prior.
We use these reports to identify and update parts of the site where it's shown that visitors didn't find information that is already available, and to evaluate creation of new content. No personally identifying information is gathered when using the seach function. Read siteLevel Privacy Policy for more information.
Hotjar
Hotjar is a technology service that helps us better understand our site visitor/user experience (e.g. how much time you spend on which pages, which links you choose to click, whether you found the information you were looking for, etc.), using cookies and other technologies to collect data on your behavior and which devices you were using.
Hotjar stores this information in a pseudonymized user profile. Neither Hotjar nor we will ever use this information to identify individual users or to match it with other data on an individual user.
Read HotJar's privacy policy here. You can also opt-out to the creation of a user profile, Hotjar's storing of data about your usage of our site and Hotjar's use of tracking cookies on other websites with this opt-out link.
MailChimp
MailChimp is email marketing software (EMS) which provides businesses with tools for managing email list subscribers and sending them emails.
Big Volcano® currently uses MailChimp to collect the names and email addresses of people who are interested in getting notified when we update our weekly markets directory listings. We have updated our sign-up form to be GDPR compliant.
Mailchimp "automatically place single pixel gifs, also known as web beacons, in every email sent by our users. These are tiny graphic files that contain unique identifiers that enable us and our users to recognize when their subscribers have opened an email or clicked certain links.
These technologies record each subscribers email address, IP address, date, and time associated with each open and click for a campaign. We use this data to create reports for our users about how an email campaign performed and what actions subscribers took."
Unless you specifically sign up for a Big Volcano® newsletter, this section won't apply.
Read MailChimp's Cookie Statement, Global Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
Affiliate Programmes
Big Volcano® currently has affiliate arrangements with Booking.com, Wotif.com. and RedBubble.com
Big Volcano® Tourism Marketing & Media has affiliate arrangements with third party tourism booking and reservation providers, Booking.com ("The world's largest selection of places to stay"), and Wotif.com ("Aussie for Travel. The know-how to go now."), where you can check accommodation, tours and attractions availability in real time, and book these directly online via the selected links provided.
We also provide links to personally selected original art products from RedBubble ("Awesome products designed by independent artists").
Big Volcano® will receive a commission from these providers from any resulting fulfilled booking or sale.
These companies use cookies to monitor their overall traffic statistics and to track bookings made and commissions payable to affiliates, when these links are clicked. These cookies are usually set to automatically expire between 30-90 days.
Big Volcano® doesn't get Personally Identifiable Information from these companies if you choose to make a tour, attraction, or accommodation booking, or make a product purchase via a link clicked from Big Volcano®.
When you do make a booking or product purchase using these services, you are bound by their Terms of Service and Privacy conditions.
Read more: Booking.com Privacy and Cookies. Wotif.com Privacy Policy. RedBubble Privacy Policy
Donations, subscriptions, tips & commissions
Big Volcano participates in Ko-fi.com. You may see the Ko-fi donation/tip logo or a text link on selected Big Volcano® web pages, editiorial, email and social media posts.
"Ko-fi is the friendly way to receive one-off or monthly income from fans. Supporters are able to follow, donate, purchase or subscribe to receive Creator Content."
Ko-fi.com: Terms and Conditions of Use. Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy
Google Adsense affiliate programme. See below.
Google Services
We use Google Adsense programme, and Google Analytics service, which both use cookies to provide their services.
We also embed YouTube videos which we think maybe be useful, entertaining, or of interest, on relevant pages. These may use a cookie to anonymously gather statistics on how you got there and what videos you viewed.
See the Google Privacy Policy, How Google uses cookies, Google Privacy & Terms - Advertising, and YouTube Terms of Service, for more information.
Google AdSense
We use the programme offered by Google AdSense to serve advertisements on selected pages of our web site, to deliver information about goods and services that maybe of interest to you.
"By default, ad requests to Google serve personalized ads, with ad selection based on both the content of the web page and the history of the individual user visiting the page. Google also supports serving non-personalized ads.
Non-personalized ads are targeted using contextual information rather than the past behavior of a user. Although these ads don't use cookies for ads personalization, they do use cookies to allow for frequency capping, aggregated ad reporting, and to combat fraud and abuse."
Big Volcano® has adjusted its Google AdSense settings to offer EEA (European Economic Area) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), visitors only non-personalised ads. "Google will show only non-personalised ads to your users in the EEA.", and "Google will only show non-personalised ads to eligible users in California. Non-personalised ads are based on contextual information, such as the content of your site or app."
We have also set options to show User-based ads and Third party ads.
"User-based ads – show ads based on users' interests, demographics and Google Account information", and allow Google to collect visitation information from our site/s to create interest categories.
Third party ads ... allows Google certified networks to target our "inventory" (web page editorial content) using third-party audience data that they already have. (That's why you'll sometimes see ads from a web site you might have visited, or a product or service you searched for or purchased recently.)
"You can use Ads Settings to manage the Google ads you see and opt out of Ads Personalization. Even if you opt out of Ads Personalization, you may still see ads based on factors such as your general location derived from your IP address, your browser type, and your search terms."
If you would like more information about Google AdSense Privacy and to know your choices about not having this information used by Google, you can read detailed Google Advertising cookie and privacy information here.
Google Analytics
Big Volcano also uses Google Analytics, which is a web analytics tool provided by Google Inc, that helps us understand how visitors engage with our website. It reports website trends in agregate without identifying individual visitors. We can choose from a variety of reports which show us the ways visitors interact with our website, so we can make improvements where they're called for.
We don't currently employ any user identifiable tags, but we have updated our Data Retention settings to expire after 38 months ( 3 years, 2 months), for any 'user-level and event-level data associated with cookies, user-identifiers (e.g., User-ID) and advertising identifiers (e.g., DoubleClick cookies, Android's Advertising ID, Apple's Identifier for Advertisers)." Read more about Google Analytics Data Retention.
Remarketing is also turned off to reduce ad personalisation. (According to Google, remarketing means that: "Google's signed-in users who have chosen to enable Google to associate their web and app browsing history with their Google account, ... [allows Google and its certified partners] to use such information from their Google account to personalise ads.") Read more about Remarketing in Google Analytics.
Social Media
We also "embed" widgets from various social media platforms in our pages to share content from our participating profiles and pages. These widgets will download cookies to your device, or update existing cookies.
To understand what information is collected and what cookies are set by these third parties, please refer to the privacy policy of the relevant social platform.
If you are concerned about this, you can disable third-party cookies in your browser settings (see "Refusing Cookies" below). You can also reduce the impact of being tracked by social media widgets, by logging out of all social networks, before visiting our website.
We've also made our own buttons that just link directly to our social media page or profile. If you want to like or follow us, or to share any of our content, you'll need to log in, if you aren't already.
Facebook (Meta)
Make the privacy choices that are right for you. Learn how to manage and control your privacy on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and other Meta Products. Meta Privacy Center
Facebook Cookies. Facebook Data Policy, Facebook Privacy, FACEBOOK INC. AND THE EU-U.S. and SWISS-U.S. PRIVACY SHIELD
Twitter Privacy Policy, Twitter for Websites widgets "When you view Twitter content such as embedded Tweets, buttons, or timelines integrated into other websites using Twitter for Websites, Twitter may receive information, including the web page you visited, your IP address, browser type, operating system, and cookie information.
To protect privacy, we never associate this web browsing history we collect from Twitter for Websites with customers’ names, email addresses, phone numbers, or Twitter handles, and we delete, obfuscate, or aggregate it after no longer than 30 days, as explained in our privacy policy."
Refusing Cookies
If you are concerned about your privacy, you can set your web browser to expire or refuse cookies. Check your browser > Help for "cookies" or "privacy". Please note; as a general rule, cookies cannot personally identify you, and refusing cookies may reduce or "break" the functionality of web sites which use cookies to provide some services.
You might also take advantage of 3rd party browser "add-ons" such as Adblock, Flashblock, Google Opt-out Browser Add-on, Ghostery etc., which you can "add-on" to your browser, to automatically refuse or block pop-ups, cookies and other types of 3rd party trackers. See your browser > Tools > "add-ons" or "extensions", for more information.
Or just go to Cookies and You at https://cookies.insites.com/disable-cookies/. It gives you step by step instructions for the most popular browsers, including tablets and mobile devices.
Linking to Other Sites
Big Volcano® provides links to other web sites, not owned or controlled by Big Volcano®, that we think might be useful or of interest.
However, we can't be responsible for the cookie and privacy practices of other web site owners or the content or accuracy of information provided on those web sites. Links to these non Big Volcano® web sites does not necessarily imply endorsement of, or support for an individual or organisation, or any products, services or other material contained in them.
While we regularly revisit web sites that we link to, to check they are still relevent in relation to the information we provide, please do your own due diligence regarding the information, products or services offered, and read their privacy and cookies policies to be sure you are comfortable with their privacy and cookie practices.
Security
Big Volcano® continually monitors security issues, and seeks to ensure the integrity and privacy of personal information submitted to us. We periodically update our security measures in line with current technologies.
Changes to This Statement
Big Volcano® may change this Statement. Please revisit this policy occasionally to see if there have been any changes that may affect you. This statement is not intended to, or create, any contractual or other legal rights in or on behalf of any party.
How to Contact Us
Big Volcano® Tourism Marketing & Media is the controller of personal data as described in this Privacy Statement. Big Volcano® Tourism Marketing & Media is a partnership, registered under the laws of New South Wales, Australia.
If you have any questions or concerns regarding our Cookies and Privacy Policy or our use of your information, please contact us, or write to us at the following address:
Data Controller
Big Volcano® Tourism Marketing & Media
PO Box 28,
Murwillumbah NSW 2484,
Australia
