Privacy Policy

Distinguished Constructions trading as Distinguished Homes (“Distinguished”) and its related entities recognises the importance of protecting the privacy of personal information and sensitive information collected in a number of ways including:

from publicly available sources of information;
when you visit our website and / or via software, such as cookies and web or tracking pixels;
from you directly;
from third parties;
from our own records at Distinguished; and
When legally required to do so.

Personal Information and Sensitive Information

Personal Information refers to information or an opinion about an identified individual or an individual who is reasonably identifiable.

Sensitive information refers to information or an opinion about an individual’s personal preferences and characteristics (such as race, ethnicity, political opinions, memberships, religious or philosophical beliefs and sexual preference), health information about an individual, genetic information and/or biometric information. Sensitive information is afforded a higher level of protection than other personal information.

Kinds of information held and collected by Distinguished

Personal information held by us is collected only when knowingly and voluntarily submitted by you. When you register your interest or otherwise in the course of us providing our services to you, we may need to collect personal information which may include your name, telephone/mobile phone number, e-mail address, build requirements and postcode.

Sensitive information held by us is collected only when knowingly and voluntarily submitted by you. Although we will rarely hold and/or collect this kind of information, the information we may hold includes your preferences and interests. At all times, we will take reasonable steps to obtain your express consent where we propose to handle your sensitive information.

Collecting information from you

Generally:

we will tell you why we are collecting information when we collect it and how we plan to use it or these things will be obvious when we collect the information; and
we will only use your personal information if and when we need to contact you.

For example, we may need to collect such information to provide you with further services or to answer or forward any requests or enquiries. It is our intention that this policy will protect your personal information from being dealt with in any way that is inconsistent with applicable privacy laws in Australia.

If you choose not to provide personal information to us, we may not be able to provide you with access to the parts of this Site or to certain content, products and services available on or from this Site or generally from Distinguished.

Use of Information

Purpose of collecting and holding information

We use your information to provide our services to you or to fulfil administrative functions associated with these services. Personal information is used only for the purpose for which it is submitted or for such other secondary purposes that are related to that purpose, unless we disclose other uses in this Privacy Statement or at the time of collection.

Primary purpose refers to the particular purpose for which the information in question was collected. For example, if we were to provide you with a newsletter and we asked for your address to send it to you, the primary purpose for the collection for your address would be to send the newsletter to you at your address.

Secondary purpose is any purpose other than the primary purpose for which we have collected your personal information. Personal information will only be disclosed or used for a secondary purpose where;

you have consented to the use or disclosure;
you would reasonably expect Distinguished to use or disclose the information for that secondary purpose;
the use of disclosure is required by or under an Australian law or a court/tribunal order;
a ‘permitted general situation’ exists, such as lessening or preventing a serious threat to life, health or safety, locating a missing person or to undertake a confidential alternative dispute resolution process; and
Distinguished reasonably believes that the use or disclosure of the information is reasonably necessary for one or more enforcement related activities conduct by or behalf of an enforcement body.

We usually collect personal information such as your name, telephone number, and in some instances, some of your business details. When you are on our website, we may collect information regarding the pages within our network which you visited, what you clicked on and your IP address. As a general rule we do not collect sensitive information. However, if we do, it will usually be for the purposes of providing our services and if the law requires us to, we will seek your consent to collect it.

If you subscribe to receive promotional or other material from us or are registered for any services, then your personal information that you provide will be recorded. Your email address will only be used for the purpose for which you have provided it (which may include being added to our mailing list, and in the instance when we are delivering a project in partnership with another company it may also include being added to the partner’s mailing list for that particular project) but otherwise it will not be added to any other mailing lists.

From time to time, Distinguished may also use your information to contact you for market research purposes. Distinguished may contact you by email, phone, fax or mail. Distinguished may use the information to customise the website according to your interests.
Distinguished will not sell, distribute or lease your personal information to third parties unless it has your permission or is required by law to do so. Distinguished may use your personal information to send you promotional information about third parties which it thinks you may find interesting if you tell us that you wish this to happen.

Parties who will have access to personal information

Generally, your personal information will only be accessed by Distinguished staff and officers when and where it is appropriate or necessary. However, your personal information may also be accessed, from time to time, by external parties such as;

Distinguished contractors and service providers who assist Distinguished in the operation of its business or to provide a customer service (for example, a company distributes a mail out to clients);
Distinguished project partners and suppliers;
third party lenders and insurers;
anyone authorised by a provider of personal information; and
relevant parties and government agencies in situations when Distinguished is required by law to provide the information.

Where a party, other than an employee or officer of Distinguished, has access to the personal information of individuals, they will be required to comply with the Privacy Act (1988) (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles and, where appropriate, to enter into privacy agreements with Distinguished.

Holding information securely

We strive to ensure the security, integrity and privacy of personal and sensitive information of our clients. We use a variety of physical and electronic security measures including restricting physical access to our offices and firewalls and secure databases to keep personal information secure from misuse, loss or unauthorised use or disclosure. In relation to personal information provided through our website, unfortunately, no data transmission over the Internet can be guaranteed to be totally secure.

Cookies Policy

A cookie is a small text file stored on your computer’s browser. Many cookies from websites will be visible from your browser. You will usually find information on cookies and how to manage them under “options” or “settings” in your browser. You can choose to see cookies before deleting them and to keep cookies from some sites. You can choose to accept or decline cookies. Most web browsers automatically accept cookies, but you can usually modify your browser setting to decline cookies if you prefer. This may prevent you from taking full advantage of the website

Generally Distinguished use traffic log cookies to identify which pages are being used and learn about the way you interact with Distinguished’s content and to help us improve your experience when visiting Distinguished’s website. This helps us analyse data about web page traffic and improve the Distinguished website in order to tailor it to customer needs. Distinguished only uses this information for statistical analysis purposes and the data is then removed from the system.

Distinguished may record your visit through the use of cookies and may log the following information for purely statistical purposes:

your server address;
your to-level domain name (eg. .com, .gov, .uk, etc);
the date and time of your visit to Distinguished’s site;
the pages accessed and documents downloaded by you;
the previous site(s) visited by you; and
the type of browser used by you.

Distinguished will not facilitate the merging of personally-identifiable information with non-personally identifiable information collected through any cookies, tracking / web pixels or Google advertising products or features, unless it has robust notice of and the relevant party’s consent to that merger.

Distinguished’s website also makes use of third party cookies – these are cookies sent by businesses that provide content, such as advertising, on websites that you visit – that is, businesses other than Distinguished. Third party cookies are used on Distinguished’s website to enable remarketing and reporting for impression assisted visits, website conversions, user demographics and user interests.

The third party cookies used on Distinguished’s website include, but are not limited to, Google Analytics Advertising Features (via the use of Google advertising cookies), cookies from YouTube and the Facebook tracking / web pixel.

If you do not want information collected through the use of cookies, there is a simple procedure in most browsers that allows you to deny or accept the cookie feature. You should note that cookies may be necessary to provide you with features and / or functions on this website and on other websites.

If you want to opt out of the operation of third party cookies – such as those associated with the Google Analytics Advertising Feature – you will need to refer to the privacy policies of the relevant third party website(s).

Social Media

When you browse and make use of Distinguished’s social media pages (such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+ and YouTube), you are using an external site and are therefore subject to the privacy policies and practices of that site. If you have any questions or concerns regarding that site’s privacy policies and practices, you should review the privacy policy of the relevant site. Distinguished does not endorse, and is not accountable for, any views expressed by third parties using that site.

Distinguished records all information posted to its social media pages and uses that information for the purposes of administering the pages, for record keeping, for considering and / or addressing any comments made and for running competitions and campaigns. No attempt will be made to further identify social media subscribers except where requested and authorised by law.

Problems or questions

If you have any queries relating to this Privacy Statement, or you have a problem or complaint, please email us via the contact us section of our website or write to us at the above address.