Privacy Notice

To continue to registration, read the following and press 'next' at the bottom of this page

This statement sets out the Australian National Univeristy (ANU) policy relating to the collection and use of your personal information in the e-couch site. This Notice is in addition to the Terms of Use. Your registration as an e-couch user constitutes your agreement to the terms of the Privacy Notice and the Terms of Use.

Please note that this Privacy Notice applies only to the e-couch site and not to any other sites that are linked to the e-couch site or mentioned on the site.

Your personal information is important to us

ANU recognises that your privacy is very important to you and that we are under a legal obligation to protect the integrity of your personal information. When you register with e-couch you will be asked to enter a username.

We strongly suggest that you use a pseudonym or a made-up username

Why the program collects personal information from you

When you enter the e-couch site you will be asked to complete a number of quizzes and enter information about yourself and how you are feeling - some of which you may consider to be sensitive. The program asks for this information in order to provide you with tailored and specifically relevant information about stress, anxiety and depression. The information is stored in your workbook in the e-couch database, along with information about the date and time you complete each exercise. Information about the pages you visit on the site is also collected. This is intended to help the e-couch designers understand how visitors use the program.

Note that we do not ask you for identifying information such as your name or address. We do ask for your email address, which you may choose to provide. This is intended so that we can send your registration details for your reference, and so that you may choose to have reminders sent to you by email in the future.

All information gathered through e-couch is stored on a secure server and is subject to all reasonable security measures.

ANU will not use or disclose any information about you without your consent unless we are required to do so by law. ANU will never use your personal information to send you unsolicited information or ‘spam’ and ANU will never give any of your personal information, your username or your browser details to any advertisers.

Our use of cookies

The e-couch site uses transient or session cookies. Cookies are pieces of information that a website transfers to your computer's hard disk when you open the e-couch web pages. Cookies by themselves do not identify you or any user but they do identify your browser. Because e-couch uses 'transient' cookies, your computer does not retain the information delivered in the cookie once you leave the e-couch site. When you close your browser the transient cookie set up by e-couch is destroyed, and no personal information is retained which could identify you or your browser next time you log on to e-couch.

Most web browsers are set up to accept cookies, and while you can set your browser to not accept cookies, you will not be able to use e-couch if you do this.

It is important to keep your web browser up-to-date with the latest security updates, as these can affect the way your browser handles cookies.

Storage and security of your personal information

ANU will take all reasonable steps to keep all information about you secure. Your information is held on a secure server. In addition, all of the staff on the e-couch team, as well as all ANU employees and contractors who provide services related to our information systems, are obliged by law to respect the confidentiality of any personal information and/or research information held by ANU.

You can also play an important role in keeping your personal information secure by using a made up username and by keeping your password secure.

Use of information for our research

It is not known the best way to communicate health information to the public. Some people believe that the information has to be specifically tailored to the person's individual level of need. Others believe that information can best be delivered if it targets someone's life situation (i.e. if the person is undergoing divorce or separation the information is specific to this situation). Our aim is to find out how to communicate this information effectively. To do this we need your help in evaluating the site. At various stages of development we will be asking users to help us with the format of information on the site. This means that some of the time different versions of the site will be offered to different users. We will let you know if this is the case. If you are asked to do this, we hope that you will help us!

Click next if you have read the e-couch Privacy Notice