Privacy policy

The Eritrean Community in Australia (ABN 99 460 492 171) runs this website. We are a volunteer-run association, and we collect as little about you as we can get away with. This page explains exactly what that is in plain terms.

The short version

• You can read every public page of this site without giving us anything, and without being tracked.
• We only hold personal information about you if you create a member accountor send us a message through a form on this site.
• We never see or store your card details, and we never see your password.
• We do not sell your information, and we do not share it for advertising. Ever — including with the local businesses whose adverts appear on some pages.
• You can see and change your details yourself at any time, or ask us to delete them.

If you just read the website

We use Cloudflare Web Analytics to see which pages people find useful. It counts page views and records the country, the type of device and the site you arrived from. It sets no cookies, it does not follow you to other websites, and it does not build a profile of you. We cannot tell who you are from it, and neither can Cloudflare.

Because this site is served by Cloudflare, its servers also process your IP address to deliver pages to you and to block attacks. That is ordinary web hosting, and those logs are kept by Cloudflare rather than by us.

Cookies

This site sets no advertising or tracking cookies, which is why you have not been asked to dismiss a consent banner. There are exactly two cases where something is stored in your browser:

• If you choose another language. The translation menu is powered by Google Translate. Nothing from Google loads unless you actually pick a language — if you read the site in English, no request is ever made to them. Once you do choose one, a cookie remembers your choice, and your use of that feature is subject to Google's own privacy policy.
• If you sign in. Your browser stores a sign-in token so you are not asked for your password on every page. Signing out removes it.

Adverts

Some pages carry adverts for local businesses, markedAdvertisement. Each one is an image or a line of text that we hold on this site ourselves, next to a link. There isno ad network behind them — no AdSense, no tracking pixel, no cookie, and nothing loaded from an advertiser's server. That means an advertiser learns nothing about you at all: not that you saw their advert, not what page you were reading, not your IP address. We cannot even tell them how many people clicked.

If you follow an advert's link, you are on that business's own website and their privacy policy applies from there. Businesses pay for the space, not for anything about you, and what we will and will not run is set out on our advertising page.

If you send us a message

Several forms on this site send something to us: the newsletter sign-up, the interest form on a project page, the application form on a role, the settlement package request, the "write for us" form on our news page, and the advertising enquiry from a business. What we keep is whatever you typed into them — your email address, and depending on the form your name, phone number, suburb, business and message — along with which project, role or business it was about.

It goes to the committee so somebody can reply to you. Newsletter sign-ups are used to send you the newsletter and nothing else, and every one has an unsubscribe link. We do not add anyone to a mailing list because they applied for a role or asked about a project.

If you ask for a settlement package

To post something to you we need somewhere to post it, so that form asks for yourstreet address and postcode. We know that is more than we ask anywhere else on this site, so: it is used to address the parcel and for nothing else. It is not shared with anyone outside the committee members handling it, it is never published, and you can ask us to delete it once your package has arrived.

You do not have to be a member, and you do not have to tell us anything about your circumstances to receive one.

If you send us something to publish

There is a form on our news page for sending in an article or a story. That one is different from the others in a way worth stating plainly: if we publish what you send,your name goes on the site publicly, alongside your words. That is the point of it — it is your piece.

Your email address is never published; it is only how we reply to you. A committee member reads everything before it goes anywhere, we may edit for length or clarity, and we may decide not to publish. If you change your mind — before or after it goes up — tell us and we will take it down.

If you become a member

When you create an account in the members portal, we ask for:

• Your name — so we know who is a member, and for the AGM roll.
• Your email address — to sign you in, to contact you about membership, and to match your payment to your account.
• Your suburb — so we know roughly where our members are and can put events where people actually live. We do not ask for your street address.
• Your phone number — so the committee can reach you about membership. It is optional in practice; leave it blank if you would rather we emailed.

We also record your membership status, the date you joined and the date your membership renews.

Your password

We never see it. Passwords are handled by our accounts provider, which stores only a scrambled version that cannot be turned back into your password. Nobody at ECA can look up what your password is, and if anyone ever offers to tell you yours, something is wrong.

Your payment

Membership payments are taken on our payment provider's own page.Your card number never touches this website and is never sent to us. What comes back to us is a record that a payment of a certain amount was made on a certain date, the email address used, and the provider's reference for it. We keep that as the association's financial record — a treasurer has to be able to show who has paid.

Where your information is kept

Some of it is stored outside Australia. We think you should know that rather than have it buried in a definition:

These are established providers used by many organisations, and each is bound by its own obligations over the information it holds. We chose them for reliability and cost — we are a volunteer association and cannot run our own servers.

Who can see your details

Committee members who look after membership and finances. That is the secretary and the treasurer in practice, because somebody has to maintain the member roll and reconcile payments.

The site is built so that one member cannot see another member's details. When you are signed in you can read and change your own record and no one else's — that is enforced by the database itself, not by the website politely declining.

We do not sell your information. We do not give it to advertisers. We would only ever hand it to anyone else if the law required us to.

How long we keep it

While you are a member, and for as long afterwards as we need to keep proper financial records — associations are required to keep records of money received, and that includes membership payments. If you ask us to delete your account, we remove your contact details and keep only what the financial record needs.

Seeing, changing or deleting your information

• To see or change it: sign in and go to your profile. You can update your name, suburb and phone number yourself, immediately.
• To delete your account: email us and we will remove it. You do not have to give a reason.
• To get a copy of everything we hold about you: email us and we will send it to you.

If you think we have got something wrong or handled your information badly, tell us first — email eritreancommunityaustralia@gmail.com and we will look into it. If we cannot sort it out between us, you can raise it with the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner at oaic.gov.au.

Children

Membership accounts are for adults. Some of our programs are for young people, and where a program collects information about someone under 18 we do that on a separate form, with a parent or guardian, and not through this website.

Changes to this page

If we change what we collect, we will change this page and update the date below. This policy was last updated on 31 July 2026.

Contact

Email eritreancommunityaustralia@gmail.com, or write to Eritrean Community in Australia, Melbourne, Victoria.