Privacy Policy

1. About the Nine Group
2. Introduction
3. What is personal information
4. What kind of information do we collect and how do we collect it?
5. How will we use or disclose your information?
6. Sensitive Information
7. What marketing communications will you receive?
8. Security and management of your information
9. Tracking Technology notice
10. Display of advertising
11. Access to your personal information?
12. Deletion of your personal information
13.Privacy standards for journalists
14. Changes to this privacy policy
15. Procedure for data breaches
16. EU and Californian residents
17. Microsoft Products and Services
18. Contact us

About The Nine Group

Nine Entertainment Co. Pty Limited and its related bodies corporate (together, the “Nine Group” or “we”) is Australia’s largest locally owned media company with investments spanning commercial free to air television (the content of which includes a combination of locally produced programs as well as exclusive international content), broadcast video on demand content, streaming services, local print publications, an Australian radio network, real estate listings, car advice and listings, various digital services (which may include, amongst other things, websites, applications, smart speaker audio, augmented reality) and digital news, lifestyle and entertainment properties, various lifestyle events and a range of products and brands across publishing, advertising and consumer marketing.

The Nine Group brands include television stations like Channel 9, 9Gem, 9Rush, 9Life and 9Go!; video on demand platform 9Now; subscription video platform Stan; major digital and print mastheads including The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Sun-Herald, The Australian Financial Review, WA Today and the Brisbane Times as well as digital properties such as nine.com.au, Pedestrian.TV, Car Advice and Drive. The Nine Group also owns the 2GB, 3AW, 4BC, 6PR, 2UE, 4BH, 6GT and Magic talk back radio stations and associated digital services. Other brands that form part of the Nine Group include Traveller, Essential Kids, Good Food, Night Noodle Markets and Open Air Cinemas. As well as this, the Nine Group holds majority investments in Future Women and Domain.

The Drive Network is considered a Nine group website for the purposes of this Nine Group privacy policy. By accessing any website within the Drive Network, you accept the terms of this Nine Group Privacy Policy.  If you have any further questions or if you wish to receive more information on our information practices and Privacy Policy, please contact Drive’s nominated Privacy Officer at privacy@drive.com.au.

Introduction

We are committed to protecting and maintaining your privacy and we are bound by the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs) and Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) (Privacy Act). As part of our business operations we may collect your personal information. This Privacy Policy describes the type of personal information we may collect and how we use, hold and disclose this personal information.

Please note that due to the nature of our business activities, from time to time we will handle personal information relying on the media exemption in the Privacy Act where appropriate and applicable, as discussed in more detail below. We may also rely on related bodies corporate, employee records and other exemptions in the Privacy Act. 

This Privacy Policy is in addition to the general Terms of Use governing the Drive Network and should be read in conjunction with such Terms of Use.

If your personal information is being collected via one of our websites, the specific Nine Group collecting entity will be the entity listed as the copyright owner and operator of the website at the bottom of the webpage.  

If your personal information is being collected offline e.g. by phone or in-person, the relevant collecting entity will be made known to you as part of the collection notice given to you in connection with that activity.

What is Personal Information?

When used in this policy, the term “personal information” has the meaning given to it in the Privacy Act. In general terms, it is any information that can be used to personally identify you. This may include (but is not limited to) your name, age, gender, postcode and contact details (including phone numbers and email addresses) and possibly financial information, including your credit card, direct debit or PayPal account information. If the information we collect personally identifies you, or you are reasonably identifiable from it, the information will be considered personal information.

What Kind of Information Do We Collect and How Do We Collect It?

The type of personal information we collect will vary depending on the nature of your dealings with us. We only collect personal information that we need for our business activities, or which is volunteered to us. In general, the type of personal information we collect and hold could include (but is not limited to) your name, address (postal and email), contact details, geographic location (including your suburb or post code), gender, date of birth, activity, photograph, payment details, drivers licence (where necessary to verify your identity) and transaction details relating to your use, enquiry or purchase of products and services owned or promoted by us and any preferences you tell us about. We may collect your personal information over the internet, over the phone, when you write to us or subscribe to our services, via a live chat bot on one of our websites, through an agent or representative of us, when you attend an event or program run by us or when you participate in a survey, questionnaire, competition or other marketing campaign run by us and/or our partners.

In order to access some of our services and products, you will be asked to register with us by providing us with certain information about you which we refer to as your Nine Account. As part of creating your Nine Account, you may also be requested to provide questions and secret answers, which we use to help verify your identity and assist in resetting your password, as well as an alternate e-mail address. Currently, this may also be done using your log-in details to Facebook. By signing in on one of our websites, product or services, you may be automatically signed into other websites, products and services that use your Nine Account.

Information we collect from other sources

We may access information, including personal information, about you across the Nine Group and from third-party sources and platforms (such as social networking sites, databases, Youtube, recruitment platforms such as LinkedIn and Seek, online marketing companies, agents or representatives we have engaged via our websites, Microsoft Products, third party websites such as whichcar.com.au and ad targeting companies) and supplement the information we collect with information obtained from those third party sources.

When you connect with us through social networking services, you will be able to see the social sharing habits of your friends and connections and participate seamlessly in our social capabilities, including commenting, live blogging, reactions, ratings, gaming mechanics and sharing content. You can connect us to your third party social networking service by downloading an application and signing into the application. By connecting with us through these third-party social networking services, you are authorising us to access and use certain information from your social network profile.

If you do not provide and we do not collect your personal information in the ways we have described above, we may not be able to as effectively provide you with our products and/or services that you have requested. For example, if you do not register as a member of a website, you may not be able to access features and services that are reserved for members or we may not be able to tailor the content of our websites to your preferences so your experience of our websites may not be as enjoyable or useful.

How will we use or disclose your information?

Generally, we only use or disclose personal information for the primary purpose for which we have collected it, or for another related secondary purpose, unless you have provided your consent for us to use it for another purpose. We may use or disclose your personal information for the following primary purposes:Contacting you because you have requested to be part of a studio audience/on-air programme or have provided content for publication on our websites (including a written product review);

• Operating and improving our websites, products and services;

• Providing you with news and information about our (or our partners) products and services (including newsletters, product surveys and special offers);

• Sending marketing and promotional material about our (or our partners) products and/or services that we consider you may be interested in;

• Providing you with more effective customer service or responding to a customer service enquiry from you;

• Enabling us to conduct customer research;

• To conduct a credit check of your business as part of setting up a corporate credit account;

• Making our websites, services or products easier to use by eliminating the need for you to repeatedly enter the same information;

• Allowing you to access protected parts of our websites;

• Allowing you to comment on content displayed on our websites (such as car reviews);

• Conducting business process functions and other administrative functions for the operation of our websites and/or our business;

• Performing quality control, product development, research and analysis aimed at improving our products, services and technologies;

• To enable on-air presenters to appropriately address you, contact you if your call drops out or if further information is required about your call, to know the subject matter of your call and whether you’ve called previously;

• To enable us to prepare off air for programs or news stories;

• To allow you to sign in or otherwise access products and/or services owned by us;

• Displaying content and advertising that are personalised and customised to your interests, preferences and experiences, including by using aggregated information received from across the Nine Group websites and other third parties;

• For recruitment purposes, where you have shared personal information with us as part of a job application;

• Conducting competitions or promotions either ourselves or by selected third parties such as our sponsors or advertising customers;

• To provide such personal information to specific third parties you have authorised us to disclose it to, including finance brokers, agents and car dealers to contact you in relation to an enquiry submitted via one of our websites or through our advertising on third party digital properties;

• Verifying your identity;

• Sending marketing and promotional material about products and/or services that we believe you may be interested in;

• Communicating with you, including by email, mail, SMS or telephone.

• Investigating any complaints about or made by you or assisting the police or any regulatory body to do so, or if we have reason to suspect that you are in breach of any of our Terms of Use or that you are or have been otherwise engaged in any unlawful or prohibited activity; 

• Sharing with our employees, related bodies corporate, joint venture entities, partners, contractors, agents or external service providers to fulfil any of these purposes. External service providers may include (without limitation) web hosting providers, IT systems administrators, mailing houses, newsagents, couriers, payment processors, photographic analysers, data entry service providers, debt collectors, and professional advisers; or

• Using personal information as otherwise required or permitted by any law (including the Privacy Act).

Other information, including anonymous data collected via your interaction with our websites and third party sites (where we provide website analytics tools or deliver advertisements) using tracking technologies such as cookies and web beacons (described below) may be sold or otherwise provided by us to third parties including our partners, clients and service providers for purposes including (but not limited to) data-matching, campaign analysis, selling aggregated anonymous data via advertising exchanges, conducting launch surveys, and modelling.

We will not provide any personal information to an advertiser or any other third party without your express consent or in accordance with our Privacy Policy. However, to the extent that anonymous user data does not constitute personal information, we are entitled to deal with that information in any manner we see fit.

You expressly acknowledge and agree that information including your personal information may be shared within the Nine Group and third parties referred to in this Privacy Policy for use by those organisations for any of the purposes disclosed in this Privacy Policy.

Sensitive Information

We do not generally collect sensitive information as that term is used in the Privacy Act (including information relating to your racial or ethnic origin, membership of political bodies, religion or trade unions, sexual preferences or activities, criminal record, state of health or medical history). However, in some instances, such information might be disclosed during the course of your interaction with us, for example during a talkback radio or televised conversation. If we hold any sensitive personal information about you, that information will only be used and disclosed by us if you have consented to such use and disclosure (your provision of that information will be taken to be consent), and will only be used and disclosed for the purpose that it was provided by you.

What Marketing Communications Will You Receive?

Opting In

In certain contexts when we collect information from you, you may be asked to “opt in” to consent to us using or disclosing your personal information. For example, you may be asked to opt-in to receive further information or communications from our advertisers and partners. We do not provide your personal information to other organisations for the purpose of direct marketing unless expressly authorised by you.

If you receive communications from us that you believe have been sent to you other than in accordance with this Privacy Policy, or in breach of any applicable law, please contact us at privacy@nine.com.au.

Opting Out / Unsubscribing

We may send you direct marketing communications and information about products and services that we consider may be of interest to you.  These communications may be sent in various forms, including mail, telephone, SMS or email, in accordance with applicable marketing laws, such as the Spam Act 2004 (Cth).  If you indicate a preference for a method of communication, we will endeavour to use that method whenever practical to do so. 

You will be given the opportunity to “opt out” from receiving communications from us or from third parties that send communications to you in accordance with this Privacy Policy. For example, you will be given the option to unsubscribe from newsletters, emails and other marketing or promotional material sent by us. You may also opt-out of ‘interest based advertising’ (also known as ‘online behavioural advertising’) (interest based advertising) as set out under ‘Display of Advertisements’ below.

If you receive communications purporting to be connected with us or our services that you believe have been sent to you other than in accordance with this Privacy Policy, or in breach of any applicable law, please contact us.

Security and Management of Your Information

We understand that the security of your personal information is important. It is our policy to ensure that all Nine Group employees understand and take reasonable steps to keep personal information secure. Once collected, we may hold your personal information in a number of different formats, including (but not limited to) software programs (located both onsite and offsite, including in the cloud), databases, filing systems, in offsite backup storage and in other similar technology. We take all reasonable steps to protect your personal information (and your anonymous usage data) and keep it secure from loss, unauthorised access, modification, disclosure, interference or other misuse.

We also impose strict requirements of security and confidentiality on all third parties (for example, those who provide us with technology services) as to how they store, handle and deal with the personal information and anonymous usage data that we hold.

Personal information and anonymous usage data collected by us may be stored, disclosed and processed both in Australia and/or overseas, including but not limited to the United States, New Zealand, China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore. Some of our third party contractors and service providers may perform some of their services overseas and/or we may use data hosting and cloud based IP service providers who are located overseas. In all instances where this occurs, we only disclose your personal information to them and authorise them to use it in accordance with the APPs and this Privacy Policy.

Tracking Technologies Notice

We also collect anonymous usage data about your browsing activity on the Nine Group’s network via various tracking technologies (for example, via cookies, tags, pixels). Our third party service providers may also collect anonymous usage data on the terms of their privacy policies which will be disclosed to you where relevant. This anonymous usage data may be used to identify your device on third party digital services where we have an arrangement in place to serve ads on those third party digital services. We may also collect anonymous usage data from third party digital services. One of the reasons we collect usage data is to display to you more relevant advertisements or content on the Nine Group network and also on third party digital services.

Tracking technologies contain information that can later be read by a web server in the domain that issued the tracking technology to anonymously identify your device. We use the following types of tracking technologies:

• Strictly necessary tracking technologies. These are tracking technologies that are required for the operation of our digital services. They include, for example, tracking technologies that allow you to sign in and use our services and remember you when you sign in to secure areas of our digital services.

• Analytics tracking technologies. They allow us to recognise and count the number of visitors and to see how visitors move around our websites. Some of the tools we use only provide us with information about trends and aggregate user behaviour. Other tools we use enable us to see how each visitor engaged with our website. For example, we will be able to see what you clicked on and how you navigated through our websites. We use this information to better understand how our visitors use our websites, so that we may make the necessary improvements to enhance our visitors’ experience in the future. We do not attempt to identify you with this information.

• Functionality tracking technologies. These are used to recognise you when you return to our services and to allow us to personalise our content for you, for example, by remembering your preferences.

• Advertising tracking technologies. These tracking technologies record your visit to our digital services, the pages you have visited and the links you have followed. We will use this information to make our digital services and the content and advertising displayed on it more relevant to your interests. We also use this information to determine the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. We may also share this information with third parties for this purpose. We also permit advertisers to embed their own tracking technologies in their own advertisements. Generally, advertisers will embed tracking technologies in their own advertisements to monitor the performance of their advertising campaign.

• Measurement tracking technologies. We also permit third party service providers to embed tracking technologies on our digital services to assist them to provide measurement and analytics services in relation to the use of our digital services.

• Social media tracking technologies. We use these tracking technologies when you connect and share our content and information using a social media sharing button or “like” button on our digital services to keep track of the way end-customers engage with and share our content. The social network will record that you have done this and this information may be linked to their targeting/advertising activities.

We also use tracking technologies as described in Display of Advertisements below. You have the ability to accept or decline tracking technologies. If you choose to decline tracking technologies, you may not be able to sign in or use other interactive features of our websites and services, and some advertising preferences may not be able to be respected. If you choose to accept tracking technologies, you also have the ability to later delete tracking technologies that you have accepted.

Third-party Technology Service Providers. We use various third-party service providers to provide us some of the technologies described in this Privacy Policy including the third party service providers listed below. These third party service providers will have access to the data we collect using their services.

Third-party	Services Provided	Privacy Policy
Google	Google provides us with ad serving and ad exchange services. Anonymous aggregated user data collected and processed by us may be shared with Google to make the advertising you see our websites more relevant to you.	Google
AppNexus	AppNexus provides us with ad serving and ad exchange services. Anonymous aggregated user data collected and processed by us may be shared with AppNexus to make the advertising you see on our websites more relevant to you.	AppNexus
Adobe	Adobe provides us with analytics and data management services. This includes the grouping of visitors to our websites into ‘audience segments’ which are made available by us to our third party ad servers to make the advertising you see on our websites more relevant to you.	Adobe
Xandr	Xandr provides us with ad serving and ad exchange services. Anonymous aggregated user data collected and processed by us may be shared with AppNexus to make the advertising you see on our digital services more relevant to you.	Xandr
Magnite	Magnite Magnite provides us with ad exchange services. Anonymous aggregated user data collected and processed by us may be shared with Magnite to make the advertising you see on our digital services more relevant to you	Magnite
Pubmatic	Pubmatic provides us with ad exchange services. Anonymous aggregated user data collected and processed by us may be shared with Pubmatic to make the advertising you see on our digital services more relevant to you	Pubmatic

We utilise the Nielsen//Netratings Australia auditing system on our Nine Group websites. Nielsen//Netratings Australia collects data and uses cookies and web beacons on our websites. For further information about Nielsen//Netratings Australia’s collection of data, use of cookies and web beacons or to access Nielsen//Netratings Australia’s opt-out tool, please visit http://www.nielsen.com/au/en/privacy-policy.html.

Display of Advertisements

Many of the websites and services the Nine Group offers are supported by advertising. We may display advertisements on our websites and the sites of our advertising partners. When we display online advertisements to you, we will place cookies and/or other tracking technologies on your computer in order to recognise your computer each time we display an advertisement. The cookies and/or other tracking technologies we use for advertising have an expiry date of no more than two years. We are able to compile information over time about where you, or others who are using your computer, saw and/or clicked on the advertisements we display. We use this information and other data to make predictions about your characteristics, interests or preferences and to display targeted advertisements that we believe may be of interest to you. We may also associate this information with your visit, purchase or other activity on participating advertiser’s websites in order to display targeted advertisements or to determine the effectiveness of the advertisements for our own use and/or for the use of third parties.

For example, if we inferred that you are interested in bicycles, you may see advertisements for different brands or types of bicycles whereas if we infer that someone else is interested in travel, they might see advertisements for flights and accommodation packages. It is this targeting which enables us to optimise our advertising and your user experience and to provide you with more relevant information about different products and services available to you. If advertisers also embed their own cookies and/or other tracking technologies in their advertisements on our websites, any anonymous browsing data that they collect from these cookies cannot be used to target advertisements or content to users off our network. We encourage advertisers to have a privacy policy that outlines their data collection activities and usage. Please refer to such third party privacy policies for more information.

Your advertising choices

When we display interest based advertising, we take a number of steps designed to protect your privacy. Page views, clicks and search terms used for ad targeting are stored separately from your contact information or other data that directly identifies you. We use interest based advertising to make the ads you see on our network more relevant to you. Online advertisements on our websites are served by ad servers and exchanges. These companies may offer you a way to opt in or opt-out of ad targeting based on their cookies If you would like to opt out of interest based advertising please click here. You can also manage cookies in your web browser privacy settings.

Please note that even if you opt out of interest based advertising, anonymous usage data may however continue to be collected by us for other purposes. 

Access To Personal Information

Under the Privacy Act, you have the right to request access to the personal information which we hold about you. If you wish to exercise your right under the Privacy Act to seek access to the personal information that we hold about you, we ask that you contact us at privacy@nine.com.au. If you make an access request, we will require you to verify your identity before we provide you with any access.

We will endeavour to acknowledge your request for access within 7 days, and to provide you with the access to which you are legally entitled within 30 days of the date of receipt of your request. We will notify you if we consider it will take longer than 30 days to provide you with access. If you seek access to records held by us which are not current records, we will need to contact you to discuss your request and it may take a longer period of time to locate these records and we may charge you a nominal administrative fee for the cost of providing access. If we are not legally required to provide access to the personal information requested and we exercise our discretion not to provide that information, we will let you know our reasons for doing so.  

Changes to your information

We endeavour to ensure that the personal information we hold is accurate, complete and up-to-date. You have the right to ask us to correct information about you which is inaccurate, incomplete, out of date, not relevant or misleading. Alternatively, if you have a Nine Account, you can access and update personal information you have entered in relation to that account by logging in and accessing or updating that information.

Deletion of your Personal Information

If you are a customer of one of the services provided by the Nine Group and no longer wish to use one of our services, you can ask us to delete the personal information you provided to that service when you registered for, or provided certain information to, the service or updated your profile such as your username, name, address, telephone number and email address.

To request the deletion of your personal information from one of our services, please contact: privacy@drive.com.au

We may not be able to comply with all requests, for example for legal or business reasons such as if we need to continue using the personal information for the purposes for which it was initially collected or for related business purposes, the personal information is required to comply with our legal obligations including to third parties or the courts, or for certain classes of information which cannot be deleted for technical reasons.

Privacy Standards for Journalists

As we are in the media industry, the APPs do not apply to acts done or practices engaged in by us in the course of journalism as we are committed to other journalistic standards dealing with privacy. Specifically:

• In relation to our online and print journalism activities, we are committed to complying with the various standards developed by the Australian Press Council in conjunction with its constituent members, available at https://www.presscouncil.org.au/statements-of-principles/;
• In relation to our television broadcasting activities, our handling of personal information in the course of our journalism activities is governed by the Commercial Television Code of Practice which can be accessed here: https://www.freetv.com.au/resources/code-of-practice/; and the ACMA Privacy Guidelines for Broadcasters which can be accessed here:https://www.acma.gov.au/publications/2016-09/guide/privacy-guidelines-broadcasters; and
• In relation to our radio broadcasting activities, we are committed to complying with the standards developed by Commercial Radio Australia (CRA) , as set out in the CRA “Codes of Practice and Guidelines” which are available on the CRA website at http://www.commercialradio.com.au/legal/regulation-codes.

Changes to this Privacy Policy

We may, from time to time, review and update this Privacy Policy to take account of new laws, technologies and changes to our operations. All personal information held by us will be governed by our most recent Privacy Policy which will always be available on our websites.

Procedure for Data Breaches

We do all we reasonably can to ensure your data is collected, used and held securely in accordance with industry standards. If at any time we become aware of unauthorised access to or disclosure of personal information held by us and we consider this is likely to result in serious harm to any individual to whom the information relates we will follow the data breach notification requirements under applicable law including to notify the individual involved and the relevant regulator.

EU and Californian Residents

If you are based in the European Union or California, there are specific regulations that apply in relation to the collection, processing and storing of your personal information by organisations covered by those regulations. To the extent that we are legally required to comply with those regulations in relation to any personal information and/or anonymous usage data we collect, process, disclose or store about you, we will comply with those regulations. Please note: We do not develop, target or direct our websites, products or services towards individuals (including children) situated outside Australia. Our business is targeted at individuals who are domiciled in Australia. 

We do not knowingly collect personal information about children under 16 years of age. If you believe a child in your care has provided us with personal information or data and you would like to request us to look into removing the data from our servers, please write to privacy@nine.com.au.  

Microsoft Products and Services

Some of our websites allows users to access leading global Microsoft products and services such as Outlook and Bing (“Microsoft Products”). Personal information provided by you in connection with Microsoft Products may be collected and used by us (in which case this Privacy Policy will govern our use and collection of your personal information) and Microsoft Corporation (and its affiliates) (in which case the Microsoft Online Privacy Statement will apply to Microsoft’s collection and use of your personal information).

Contact Us

If you have any questions regarding this Privacy Policy, complaints regarding how we handle your personal information or our tracking and targeting policies or if you would like to make an access request, please contact us by writing to: Privacy Officer, 52 Victoria Street, McMahon’s Point, NSW, 2060 or contact us via email at privacy@nine.com.au..

All complaints received will be assessed by our Privacy Officer and all reasonable steps (if any) will be taken to remedy the complaint. We will endeavour to acknowledge your complaint within [7] days and to respond to your complaint within 30 days of receipt of the complaint by our Privacy Officer. If you are not satisfied with our response, you may contact the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.

Last updated: 15/08/2021