Privacy

Tailored Advertising

Tailored advertising does not mean that you see more or less advertisements, it just influences the type of advertisements you see. We are involved in tailored advertising as both a marketer and a publisher. It can be based on a number of data sources:

When you browse our sites, and those of our affiliated third parties, we may collect data about your activity on these sites such as the amount of time you spent on each site, the pages you viewed and the advertisements you viewed on these sites. If you show interest in a particular topic across multiple sites we may tailor advertising or content to you based on an assumed interest in this topic. For example if you browse sporting news stories on skynews.com.au, visit afl.com.au and then sportsfan.com.au you may see advertising from sporting goods manufacturers.

This is usually enabled by the use of cookies or publically available advertising identifiers provided by operating systems like iOS and Android (you can opt-in or out of sharing these in the settings of your device or browser).

During this process, we do not collect or use any information that could identify you as an individual, just a basic history of sites visited. The information is used not only to support digital advertising, but to improve your browsing experience.

Advertising may also be tailored to you based on the specific site you are visiting or specific pages being viewed within a site. Contextual advertising is provided to you based on the keywords associated with the site or pages you are viewing. For example, when you access the NRL app, you may see advertising from brands that want to be associated with the NRL and their fan base.

This does not use cookies. It is specific to the page or content you are visiting.

In some cases, we may have access to demographic attributes associated with the visitors to one of our sites (from independent sources or internal data assets – see below). This helps us understand the types of people who see advertising or visit our sites and we may use this to present tailored advertising campaigns or page content.

For example, if we believe that the audience visiting a site is male and aged 35-40 we may promote a high-end smartphone, while a 20-25-year-old audience may see a promotion for pre-paid plans.

This information is always highly aggregated and based on common demographic attributes like region, age bracket or gender. Many companies provide this kind of audience profile information for sites. In some cases, these are based on information collected by cookies. We take great care to ensure that any audience profile information we use is aggregated, anonymous and broad.

In some cases, we may generate or maintain our own audience profiles using internal data sources or third party data (such as from the Australian Census or research companies) associated with groups of customer devices.

Any information we generate, collect or analyse for this purpose is categorised into broad audience profiles like region, age bracket or gender. Information generated in demographic audience profiles we may establish does not contain personal information and does not track your activity across sites.

We maintain a range of industry standard digital analytics platforms which help us understand more about what our customers and other visitors want and how they interact with our sites. These platforms may utilise information used for Tailored Advertising or derived from cookies. These digital analytics platforms only hold aggregated or de-identified information.

To understand our customers better, we generate anonymised, high-level population insights such as usage patterns, network performance, demographics and behavioural data, e.g. which types of services are popular with which types of customers and where. We may share these anonymised insights with some of our business partners for use in research and analysis, however, importantly, we do not share any Personal Information of our customers with these business partners. We have developed advanced privacy protection techniques that anonymise and/or aggregate our data, to prevent third parties from linking the data back to you or your device. If you’d rather have your data excluded from these activities, read more about how to opt out here Get information on how to opt-out.

Cookies are small, encrypted, text files that sites may place on your device, usually within your browser.

Sites may use cookies to improve browsing experiences like remembering login details, what content the user is interested in and other preferences in general.

Cookies are used by most sites, including Telstra’s and our affiliates’. While you browse those sites, we can use cookies to gather information about your site use, such as the amount of time you spent on each site and your content preferences. This information is then sent back to the originating site and other authorised services (such as social media sites when you like an article on afl.com.au) each time you revisit these sites.

On some of our sites, we use cookies to record advertisements you viewed and this can influence which advertisements are presented to you, for example to avoid repetition of a single advertisement. 

If you are concerned about the use of cookies, there are several ways to delete and/or block cookies.

You can choose to delete (or ‘clear’) all the cookies currently stored by your browser via your browser tools. You can also use your browser tools to block and permanently disable cookies. This will prevent you from using all services that rely on cookies until you allow your browser to start accepting cookies again. It will also prevent some types of digital advertising from occurring.

Alternatively, you can download tools which will increase your awareness of which cookies are being left on your computer and decide which cookies to permit and which to block.