Some times, our clients may ask respondents to supply personal information about themselves, including their e-mail address.

The privacy of our respondents and clients is very important to us at goVote. If you participate in one of our ballots or surveys, and decide to provide your personal information, we promise that:

• Any personal information that you do decide to provide while participating in a ballot or survey will be passed on to the relevant client organisation. It will not be passed on to anyone else, unless we are required to do so by law.
  
• We will not use your personal information for any other purpose.
  
• While it is in our custody, we will protect your personal information from misuse, loss and un authorised access, modification or disclosure.
  
• We will not pass on your e-mail address, or any other personal information that you decide to provide, to any other party.
  
• We will continuously monitor our delivery of these promises and swiftly respond to any breaches in this policy; and to any suggestions for improvement which our clients or respondents might make. If you want to talk to us about any privacy matter, contact us at privacy@govote.com.au.

Privacy and cookies
Most online survey and ballot providers use cookies because they are a quick and simple way to authenticate respondents. Unfortunately, they are not reliable or tamper proof.

No cookies are used in goVote online ballots and surveys. We have developed more effective methods to authenticate our respondents and set the benchmark for anonymity, privacy and security.

We do, however, use cookies to make our goTalk webforum more user friendly, and to address certain security issues. A cookie is a small piece of information which our Web site temporarily stores in the Web browser on your PC.

A cookie cannot be read by any Web site other than the one that set it in the first place, and it cannot be used to transmit a virus or other malicious code to your PC.

None of our cookies contain information that will enable anyone to contact you via telephone, e-mail, or any other means.

You can set up your Web browser to inform you when cookies are set or to prevent cookies from being set.

Blocking or removing cookies will have no effect on goVote online ballots or surveys, but it might prevent you from enjoying all the benefits of a goTalk webforum.

Privacy and session encryption
We offer session encryption and most of our clients, for security reasons, choose this option.

In these cases, when your browser connects to our system and before you start responding to the ballot or survey, the link between your browser and our system is secured using an encryption process known as Secure Socket Layer, or SSL.

If you look down to the bottom right of your browser window, you should see a little pad lock icon which confirms this fact. This encryption is in place for the duration of your session - i.e. until after your responses have been received by us.

This guarantees to our clients and respondents that whatever responses you send to goVote get to goVote, and cannot be seen or received by anyone else.

Your responses remain anonymous
The goVote system ensures that your responses to any of our ballots and surveys remain anonymous.

Respondent anonymity is a non negotiable condition when goVote agrees to conduct a ballot or survey for a client.

The goVote system automatically stores your completed ballot or survey with all the others we receive for that particular client, in a special secure file reserved for this purpose. No other information is placed in this file.

For authenticated surveys and ballots, the goVote system also maintains a "voter roll" in a separate secure file, which lists all of the PIN numbers that the client has decided are eligible to participate in each ballot or survey. Each PIN represents an individual, but the identity of that individual is unknown to goVote.

The only way that a response in any goVote survey or ballot can be identified as coming from you is if you identify yourself (e.g. by providing your name, telephone number or e-mail address) in answering one of the questions in the survey or ballot.

Privacy and third parties
We cannot be responsible for the privacy policies and practices of other web sites even if:

• you accessed a third party web site using links from our web site; or
• you linked to our web site from a third party web site.

We recommend that you check the policy of each site you visit and contact the owner or operator of that web site if you have any concerns or questions on privacy issues.

Also, we cannot be responsible for the privacy policies and practices of our clients. If you want to direct some questions concerning privacy towards the organisation for whom we have conducted a ballot or survey, you should contact them directly.