Freudenberg Home & Cleaning Solutions Pty Ltd (ACN 082 274 324) operates this website and business of manufacturing, sourcing and selling quality ‘Oates’ products, and is a subsidiary of the Freudenberg Group (referred to as “we", "our" and "us" in this Privacy Policy).
We take the protection of your personal data very seriously. In collecting and handling personal information, we are bound by the Privacy Act, including the Australian Privacy Principles (“APPs”), and applicable privacy regulations.
The following Privacy Policy will explain to you the manner in which we collect, use, disclose and manage personal information and data we collect about your visits to our website. You will also find our contact information below should you have questions or concerns related to the treatment of your personal data.
By engaging with our business, using our website, purchasing our goods and services, or subscribing to our services, you are taken to have read and agreed to the collection, use, disclosure and handling of your personal information in accordance with this Privacy Policy.
We may modify this Privacy Policy at any time. You should review this Privacy Policy periodically so that you are updated on any changes. We welcome your comments and feedback.
What information and data is collected?
In our business dealings we may collect personal information about you including, but not limited to your name, address, phone number, email, gender, occupation, business name, financial data, transactional data about goods you have purchased from us. This information may also be collected when you provide it to us by engaging with our website, or volunteer information about your interests, preferences and opinions (e.g. such as product reviews) when engaging with our website or social media platforms.
During your visit to our website, we may also automatically collect personal information about you including, but not limited to, data relating to your activities on our website, such as your IP address, date, time, time zone, the status of the data you request, as well as information about the website from which you navigated, your browser and the version of the operating system on your computer, via tracking technologies such as cookies, web beacons and measurement software or data relating to survey responses.
You acknowledge that the personal information we collect from you is your own information or information which you have been authorised to provide to us.
How do we collect your personal information?
We may collect personal information about you from a variety of sources including, but not limited to;
1. subscribing to receive newsletters and filling in forms, applications, surveys or research, participating in promotions and competitions on our website;
2. contacting us for any reason including, but not limited to, reporting a problem with our website, requesting further goods or services or seeking our assistance;
3. purchasing our goods and services;
4. making a warranty claim or an enquiry regarding our products;
5. corresponding with us by phone, email or otherwise;
6. posting on social media sites about our products or leaving a comment or product review.
We may receive information about you from other sources, for example if you use any of the other websites we operate or any other service we provide. We are also working closely with third parties (including, for example, other members of the Freudenberg group of companies, business partners, sub-contractors in technical, payment and delivery services, advertising networks, analytics providers, search information providers, credit reference agencies) and may receive information about you from them.
We take steps to ensure that any such third parties are legally permitted or required to disclose such information to us. Examples of information we may receive from other sources include: demographic information, device information (such as IP addresses), location, and online behavioural data (such as information about your use of social media websites, page view information and search results and links) from analytics providers and search engine providers (e.g., Google).
How is your personal information and data used?
We use the personal information we have collected largely for the purpose of:
• developing our relationship with you;
• providing you with goods and services that you have requested, including processing your order, keeping you informed as to order status and keeping a transaction history;
• providing you with information about offers, promotions, goods or services, which are similar to those already purchased and which we believe may be of interest to you;
• preparing and providing you with our newsletter;
• responding to your enquiries;
• creating and maintaining your customer account; and
• providing post-sale customer service and managing warranty or product fault claims or enquiries.
We also use the data we have collected during your visit to our website to support the technical administration of the website and for statistical purposes. This information helps us to continuously improve your experience on our website. If all or part of this information is not provided, we may not be able to provide these services.
How do we disclose your personal information and data?
We may disclose personal information and data to our related companies which provide us with (or assist us to provide) goods and services, as well as our external service providers we use to conduct our business so that they can provide you with products or services on our behalf or help us to provide you with the requested products or services.
We may share your personal information with any member of the Freudenberg Group, which means our subsidiaries, our ultimate holding company and its subsidiaries. This includes our parent company, Freudenberg Home and Cleaning Solutions GmbH, which is responsible for hosting the Oates website in Germany and storing personal data securely on our behalf.
Your personal information and the data we collect through our website may be held on servers located in Australia, and processed by staff from the Freudenberg Group or from one of our suppliers. We do not record or disclose any financial information, such as your credit card or bank account details, to any overseas entity.
When you provide us with your personal information you give us your consent to store your personal information and data outside of Australia for the purposes described above.
When personal data is transferred internationally, we will take all steps reasonably necessary to ensure that your data is treated in accordance with this Policy and that a similar degree of protection is afforded to it by ensuring at least one of the following safeguards is implemented:
• We will only transfer your personal information to countries that have been deemed to provide an adequate level of protection for personal data.
• Where we use certain service providers, we may use contractual controls to ensure appropriate protection of the personal data.
Do we use and disclose your personal information for marketing purposes?
We may:
1. use your personal information to provide you with information about offers, promotions, goods or services, which we believe may be of interest to you; and
2. share your information with our related companies to help us to provide you with the requested goods or services.
If we do contact you by using your personal information in these ways, we will give you the opportunity to request that your information not be used for further direct marketing in the future. If we have obtained your express opt-in consent, we may send you, or permit selected third parties to send you, other forms of marketing relating to other products and services. We will make sure that it is clear when you are able to give us permission to do this, for example, through tick boxes which you will need to tick if you wish to receive such communications. You have the right to withdraw your consent to receiving direct marketing at any time by contacting us.
Disclosure via sales of business and legal obligations
We may also disclose your personal information to third parties in the event that we sell or buy any business or assets, in which case we may disclose your personal data to the prospective seller or buyer of such business or assets. Alternatively, if our assets are acquired by a third party, any personal data held by it about our customers will be one of the transferred assets. If a change happens to our business, the new owners may use your personal data in the same way as set out in this Policy.
We may also be under a duty to disclose or share your personal data in order to comply with any legal obligation, or in order to enforce or apply our terms and conditions of supply and other agreements, or to protect the rights, property, or ourselves, our customers, or others.
Credit Reporting Information
We may also collect financial and trading information from customers in order to establish and manage business and customer relationship. This information is securely held for internal accounting and administration purposes associated with the provision of products and services (including the extension of commercial credit) to customers and in order to enhance our business relationship and level of service.
Collection of commercial credit information is undertaken only with consent. To complete an application to open an account or extend commercial credit we may ask you to provide information including your: business structure, trading history, details and value of trading premises, plant and equipment and forms of security over these assets.
We may receive commercial credit information about you from a credit reporting body (currently CreditorWatch), or trade referees provided by you. We may also disclose limited commercial credit information about you to third parties where you have nominated us as a trade reference, solely to fulfill this purpose. Commercial credit information will only be used to assess your credit worthiness.
To the extent that the customer is an unincorporated entity, this is personal information covered by this policy. Information about corporate customers, which is about an identifiable person, is also personal information covered by this policy. We do not have a practice of collecting or holding consumer credit information covered by the Credit Reporting Privacy Code.
Enquiries for access to or correction of commercial credit information or credit eligibility information, or complaints about any failure to comply with the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) or the Credit Reporting Privacy Code (if this binds us), can be made as set out below under "Access and Correction" and "Queries and Complaints".
Cookies
Under some circumstances we store information, so-called “Cookies”, on your computer in order to be able to offer certain services or to better understand your preferences and to optimize our website.
Cookies are small text files which frequently contain a unique identifier and which are saved to your disk from a webserver. Cookies contain information which can later be read by the webserver which stored the cookie. They often consist of a series of characters and numbers and sometimes further information which uniquely identifies your computer.
Some cookies are stored only for the duration of your visit to our website, so-called “Session Cookies”. Others, more permanent cookies can remain on your computer after your visit to our website and our website will access them every time you re-visit our website (so-called “ID Cookies”). Some cookies which are stored during your visit to our website can be read and processed by other companies. You may control the cookies from this website by altering the settings of your web browser to not accept cookies at all, to accept them by request only or by deleting them when you close your browser session. Please note that the use of some services may then be restricted and that some sections of the website will only function correctly with the use of cookies.
Google Analytics
Our website uses Google Analytics, a web analytics service provided by Google Inc. (Google). Google Analytics uses cookies. The information generated by the cookie about your use of the website (including your IP address) will be transmitted to and stored by Google on servers in the United States. Mountain View, CA 94043, USA is operated of your web browser to not analyse how users use the website.
You may refuse the use of cookies by selecting the appropriate settings on your browser. However, please note that if you do this, you may not be able to use the full functionality of this website. Furthermore you can prevent Google’s collection and use of data (cookies and IP address) by downloading and installing the browser plug-in available under https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout?hl=en-GB.
Further information concerning the terms and conditions of use and data privacy can be found
at http://www.google.com/analytics/terms/gb.html or
at https://privacy.google.com/#.
Akamai Technology
This website uses the Akamai Technology and cloud infrastructure services that distributes, accelerates and protects online applications. The Akamai A2 cookie is used to reduce page load time by using the Adaptive Acceleration feature. Adaptive Acceleration (A2) provides a suite of functionality on the Akamai intelligent Edge Platform that continuously applies performance optimizations to help improve overall digital experience for website users.
The Akamai Technology JavaScript snippet is inserted in the HTML of our website to gather anonymously data for measuring online performance. We anonymize IP addresses processed on Akamai edge servers to perform geolocation and mapping services when delivering and securing our website. The Akamai technology is, by default, limited to collecting only anonymized personal IP address data that is absolutely necessary. After geolocation services have been performed IP address that is collected when the content hits the Akamai server is immediately discarded. You can find more information about data protection policy of Akamai here.
Microsoft Clarity
Clarity enables us in making data-driven decisions on what works and what doesn’t. Clarity captures the interactions on our website such as how the page has rendered and what interactions users undertake such as mouse movements, clicks, scrolls. Clarity uses marketing cookies to track visitors across our website. When the script is installed, Clarity’s cookies send anonymous and non-personally identifiable information about website users. Clarity is a user behavior analytics tool that helps us understand how users interact with our website. Clarity is GDPR-compliant as a data controller. For more information, see the Microsoft Privacy Statement: https://privacy.microsoft.com/privacystatement and https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/clarity/cookie-consent. You can opt out of Microsoft Clarity cookies by clicking on cookie settings and preferences here.
Youtube Video Plug-ins
Our website uses video plugins from the video-sharing website youtube-nocookie.com. YouTube belongs to Google Inc., 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, USA (“Google“). We embed videos from our official YouTube channel using YouTube’s privacy-enhanced mode. This mode may set cookies on your computer once you click on the YouTube video player, but YouTube will not store personally-identifiable cookie information for playbacks of embedded videos using the privacy-enhanced mode.
You find further information concerning the treatment of user data in the Privacy Policy of YouTube under: https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en.
Meta (Facebook)
Our website uses social plugins (plugins) and Facebook Pixel from the social networking website, www.facebook.com, operated by Facebook Inc., 1601 South California Ave, Palo Alto, CA 94304, USA (“Facebook”). The plugins can be identified by one of Facebook’s logos (a white “f” on a blue tile or a “thumbs-up” icon), or the phrase “Facebook Social Plugin”. The list of Facebook social plugins and their appearances can be found here: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/.
While visiting our website your browser will contact the Facebook server and load the visual presentation of the plugin as well as present it to you. During your visit, Facebook receives information concerning your visit to our website as well as further data such as your IP address. These activated plugins allow Facebook to know that you have visited this particular page on our website. If you are logged in to Facebook at the time, it can associate your visit to the page to your Facebook account. If you interact with the plugins, for example by clicking the ‘Like’ button or by posting a comment, the information you give is then sent directly to Facebook and saved there. If you do not have a Facebook account, it is still possible for Facebook to identify and store your IP address after you have clicked the Facebook note. To find out more detail about Facebook’s data collection practices and your respective rights and privacy options, please see Facebook’s Data Protection Policy: https://www.facebook.com/about/privacy/.
If you do not want Facebook to collect data about you from our website and connect it to your member data saved on Facebook, you must log out of Facebook before visiting our website and clicking the Facebook note.
All information you provide to us is stored on the secure servers of our parent company, Freudenberg Home and Cleaning Solutions GmbH on our behalf. All payment transactions are encrypted over an SSL secured connection or are handled securely on our behalf by our carefully selected payment providers. We use our best endeavours to ensure that your data is treated securely and in accordance with this Policy and that we will comply with the relevant data protection legislation within Australia.
Accessing and correcting your personal information
Should any of your personal information be incorrect or incomplete then you have the right to review and confirm the accuracy of that information, and have it corrected or deleted. You may at any time object to the use of your personal data for marketing or market research purposes.
If you would like to access or correct the personal information we hold about you please contact us using the contact details below.
Making a complaint
We are committed to providing you with a fair and responsible system for the handling of complaints. If at any time you have any concerns, complaints or questions in relation to your privacy please contact our customer service department using the contact details below.
Contact details
You can contact us by:
1. completing the Contact Form located at https://consumer.oates.com.au/contact-page;
2. directly contacting our Customer Service Department at 1800 500 513 (Monday to Friday from 8:30am to 5:00pm); or
3. writing to:
The Privacy Officer
Freudenberg Home & Cleaning Solutions Pty. Ltd.
13-21 Maygar Boulevard, Broadmeadows
VIC 3047, Australia
or send an email to customersupport@oates.com.au
For more information about privacy issues in Australia and protecting your privacy, visit the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner’s website or call them on 1300 363 992.
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