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Privacy Policy

Take a deep breath. There is a lot to cover here...

dc&b advisory is committed to providing quality advice, services and general information on its website and social media accounts and this Privacy Policy outlines our ongoing obligations to you in respect of how we manage your Personal Information.

We have adopted the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs) contained in the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) (the Privacy Act). The APPs govern the way in which we collect, use, disclose, store, secure and dispose of your Personal Information. A copy of the APPs may be obtained from the website of The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner at https://www.oaic.gov.au/.

If you’ve read this far, we really do want you to know that managing your Personal Information is something we take very seriously. It is central to us upholding our professional reputation and our brand, and we have appropriate processes and secure systems in place to manage any Personal Information you may provide. Also, we will never sell or trade in any Personal Information you submit on our website, social media accounts or otherwise provide to us.

Who we are

We are Shiela De Castro (she/her) and Simon Beaton (he/his), the directors and beneficial owners of DC&B Advisory Pty Ltd (ABN 23 666 482 999) trading as dc&b advisory – a private company with our registered office located in Victoria, Australia.

A few important things we want you to know about us

We do use what is known as affiliate marketing (which we’ll explain further below) and we may receive commissions or other ‘kickbacks’ from suppliers of products or services where you end up purchasing those products or services via a link from our website, via our social media accounts, or by you purchasing directly from those suppliers. We are independent of those suppliers and only promote their products or services based on our own research, testing or usage. In short: when we like a supplier and we like their products or services – we are happy to recommend them to you. We would buy (and possibly have bought) these products or services with our own money. Any money we receive from suppliers via commissions, affiliate links or other kickbacks helps us offset the costs of us researching, testing and using products and services – so we can continue to provide quality advice, services and general information on our website and social media accounts.

In some instances too we have share holdings or other interests in some of the suppliers we recommend. Those interests will be disclosed to you when applicable and are managed by us in accordance with our Disclosure Policy. None of our share holdings or other interests are significant and they don’t influence whether we recommend a supplier or not to you. You may have share holdings in some of these companies too – either directly or as part of your superannuation, retirement account or pension plan. For example, we’ve got share holdings in both Microsoft and Google – but we’ll still happily tell you what we love or hate about each other’s products and what products we think may be most suitable for you needs.

OK – on to the rest of the legal stuff we need to tell you about…

What is Personal Information and why do we collect it?

Personal Information is information or an opinion that identifies an individual. Examples of Personal Information we may collect includes names, addresses, email addresses and phone numbers.

This Personal Information is obtained in many ways including interviews, meetings, correspondence, by telephone, by email, via our website www.dcandb.com.au and our social media accounts (including via comments, videos, pictures, likes, messages etc.), from your website and social media accounts, from media and publications, from other publicly available sources, from cookies and from third parties. Our website and social media accounts also contain links to other external websites and other social media accounts. We are not responsible for the privacy policies or practices of those external websites or accounts. Therefore, when clicking on a link and leaving our website or social media content, we encourage you to read the privacy statements of each external website or third party – where Personal Information may also be collected from you.

If you access social media, subscription channels or services such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube or TikTok, you would be aware that any information you post can be available for the world to see. You should therefore check your individual privacy settings for profiles and accounts on these platforms and their privacy policies. We recommend that you regularly check and configure the privacy settings for your profiles and accounts to make sure you know what information you are making available – and to which audiences.

We collect your Personal Information for the primary purpose of providing our services to you; for providing information on our website, social media accounts and directly to our clients; and for marketing purposes. We are bound by our own strict professional requirements in relation to client confidentiality and if we are permitted to share information, we continue to manage the privacy of any Personal Information collected and we use aggregate, de-identified or anonymous data in any information that is shared. We may also use your Personal Information for secondary purposes closely related to the primary purpose, in circumstances where you would reasonably expect such use or disclosure. When we collect Personal Information we will, where appropriate and where possible, explain to you why we are collecting the information and how we plan to use it.

You may unsubscribe from our mailing/marketing lists at any time by clicking on the ‘unsubscribe’ link in any of our emails, or by contacting us directly. We understand. We get it. We subscribe to A LOT of mailing lists ourselves – and sometimes the emails are too frequent, too much or we dread the follow-up phone call when we just wanted to download something that looked interesting. Rest assured we don’t like the ‘hard sell’, or intrusive or over-bearing marketing either – so we don’t want to do that to you. We hope you continue to like our stuff (content) and stay with us to be part of a community of like-minded folks. But if you don’t want to hear from us again – and Simon can totally relate because he frequently asks to be put on ‘do not contact’ lists – that’s completely cool we will put you on our do not contact list.

What is Sensitive Information?

Sensitive Information is defined in the Privacy Act to include information or opinion about such things as an individual's racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, membership of a political association, religious or philosophical beliefs, membership of a trade union or other professional body, criminal record or health information.

Sensitive Information will be used by us only:
  • For the primary purpose for which it was obtained; 
  • For a secondary purpose that is directly related to the primary purpose;
  • With your consent; or where required or authorised by law.

Third Parties

Where reasonable and practicable to do so, we will collect your Personal Information only from you. However, in some circumstances we may be provided with information by third parties. In such a case we will take reasonable steps to ensure that you are made aware of the information provided to us by the third party.

Disclosure of Personal Information

Your Personal Information may be disclosed in a number of circumstances including the following:
  • Third parties where you consent to the use or disclosure; and
  • Where required or authorised by law.

Advertising

We may accept display ads, sponsored blog posts or other forms of advertising on our website. We hate annoying pop-up ads and display ads that take up your whole screen too, but advertising helps us offset the costs of researching, testing and using products and services – so we can continue to provide quality advice, services and general information on our website and social media accounts.

We may also engage in remarketing with third parties such as Google, Facebook or Instagram in order to promote our website and our services. These companies may use cookies to present advertising to you based on your visits to our website.

We may also participate in what is known as ‘affiliate marketing’ and use affiliate links when we recommend products or services. If you purchase something through one of these affiliate links we receive a small commission at no additional cost to you. Lots of websites run by individuals and small businesses engage in affiliate marketing, for example via the Amazon Associates Program. If you click on a link for an affiliate partnership, a cookie will be placed on your browser to track any sales for the purposes of calculating commissions to us. Again – we use any commissions we receive to help offset the cost of the advice, services and information we provide.

Security of Personal Information

Your Personal Information is stored in a manner that reasonably protects it from misuse and loss and from unauthorised access, modification or disclosure. We use commercially reasonable methods to ensure the security of any Personal Information you provide to us, as well as the security of the data that we collect automatically. This includes, but is not limited to, using standard security protocols and working only with reputable third-party vendors.

When your Personal Information is no longer needed for the purpose for which it was obtained, we will take reasonable steps to destroy or permanently de-identify your Personal Information. However, most of the Personal Information is or will be stored on secure cloud services and will be kept by us for a minimum of 7 years.

Third Party Service Providers

We may share your information with third parties when you authorise us to do so (such as by subscribing to our mailing list). Additionally, we use third-party service providers to host our website, to store the information you provide to us, and to supply the systems we use in our business to provide advice, services and information. Each third-party service provider’s use of your information is governed by their respective privacy policies.

Our first preference is to use third-party service providers who store their data (and your information) on secure servers located in Australia. However, many commonly used third-party service providers don’t offer cost-effective options or have no option at all to have data hosted in Australia. In these instances, we look to the privacy policies and security policies of these service providers and their track record of protecting data – and you can too.

As an example, we use HubSpot to obtain and store Personal Information and many other Australian businesses use HubSpot too. HubSpot utilise Amazon Web Services (AWS) servers based in the USA and as part of providing information to us you are accepting that your data will be stored in accordance with the security practices of HubSpot in this instance.

We also use other commonly used tools such as Google Analytics, Convertkit and MailChimp. Google Analytics tracks website usage and provides information such as referring websites and user actions on the pages of this website. We use HubSpot and Convertkit for the delivery of email updates, newsletters and marketing material. Your email address in stored in our account with these providers for the purpose of delivering these communications to you. You can refer to HubSpot’s Privacy Policy here and Convertkit’s Privacy Policy here.

You can unsubscribe to our email updates, newsletters or marketing material by clicking on the ‘unsubscribe’ link provided at the end of each email, or by contacting us directly. Please note there may be a delay between when you click unsubscribe and when that request is fully processed so that you no longer receive the communications you unsubscribed from.

Access to your Personal Information

You may access the Personal Information we hold about you and to update and/or correct it, subject to certain exceptions. If you wish to access your Personal Information, please contact us.

We will not charge any fee for your access request but may charge an administrative fee for providing a copy of your Personal Information.

In order to protect your Personal Information we may require identification from you before releasing the requested information.

Maintaining the Quality of your Personal Information

It is important to us that your Personal Information is up to date. We will take reasonable steps to make sure that your Personal Information is accurate, complete and up to date. If you find that the information we have is not up to date or is inaccurate, please advise us as soon as possible so we can update our records and ensure we can continue to provide quality advice, services and information to you.

International Visitors to Our Little Website in Australia, Our Social Media Accounts and International Recipients On Our Mailing Lists

Wow. You folks all have different rules and some of your privacy and data protection laws are more stringent or more specific than the Privacy Act in Australia. As a small business in Australia, it’s pretty difficult for us to keep up to date with the privacy laws in the EU, UK, Brazil, Canada, China, Mexico, Switzerland (just to name a few) and even different laws between different states in the USA such as Colorado, Connecticut and Virginia. Let’s just say we will follow the general principles below from the EU GDPR, always act in good faith, hope for the best, and really wish we could visit all your countries soon!

We think the data protection rights set out in the EU GDPR policy template are pretty good (if not both vague and complex). But, we do agree that every user or visitor to our website or social media accounts is entitled to the following:
  • The right to access – you have the right to request us for copies of your personal data. We may change you an administrative fee for this service.
  • The right to rectification – you have the right to request us to correct any information you believe is inaccurate. You also have the right to request us to complete information you believe is incomplete.
  • The right to erasure – you have the right to request us to erase any personal data, under certain conditions.
  • The right to restrict processing – you have the right to request that we restrict the processing of your personal data, under certain conditions.
  • The right to object to processing – you have the right to object to us processing your personal data, under certain conditions.
  • The right to data portability – you have the right to request that we transfer the data we have collected to another organisation, or directly to you, under certain conditions.

Now that’s all clear-as-crystal, if you do make a request, we have one month to respond to you. If you would like to exercise these rights or any other rights, please contact Simon our Privacy Officer via email at info@dcandb.com.au.

Policy Updates

This Policy may change from time to time and is available on our website.

Privacy Policy Complaints and Enquiries

If you have any questions or complaints about our Privacy Policy, please contact Simon our Privacy Officer at info@dcandb.com.au.