Who we are

This is the website of the Mornington Peninsula Astronomical Society. You can contact us through the Contact form on this website, by emailing welcome@mpas.asn.au, or by post (P.O. Box 569, Frankston 3199, Victoria, Australia).

Our website address is: https://www.mpas.asn.au/.

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

Comments

When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

Media

If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.

Contact forms

If you submit a message through our contact form, we will keep the information you submit in order to process your request or reply to your comment. We will not use this information for marketing purposes or share it with any third parties.

Cookies

When you visit our site for the first time (or the first time after a while), you will be given the opportunity to opt-in or opt-out of “non-functional” cookies, which store information about your visit that is not directly required for the functioning of the site. In addition to cookies used for analytics purposes (see the section below), this site uses cookies in the following ways.

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.

If you visit our login page, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.

Embedded content from other websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Analytics

We have integrated tools from different companies in our website, which allow us to evaluate user behaviour.

Google Analytics

We use the Google Analytics service, which collects data on which website a user has come to our website from (so-called referrers), which pages of our website they accessed, and how often and for how long a page was viewed. This helps us improve our website and understand our audience.

Google Analytics uses cookies to achieve this. The information stored in the cookies is send to a Google server. You can prevent the storage of cookies by changing a setting in your web browser software, or by opting out of cookies when you first visit our site (or first visit after a while).

Google’s privacy regulations can be found at https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en and https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/. The following link provides a further explanation of Google Analytics https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/.

Facebook Pixel

We use Facebook’s “tracking pixel”. This is an element on our website that can be used to track user behaviour for users who come to our website by clicking on a Facebook or Instagram ad. This allows us to see whether our Facebook and Instagram advertisements are effective. If you come to our website by clicking one of our Facebook or Instagram ads, the tracking may be active for up to 180 days.

The facebook tracking data is anonymous for us (we can’t see any personal data), but it is stored and processed by Facebook, who may use it for its own purposes according to its privacy policy.

The Facebook Pixel uses cookies to achieve this, and if you prefer to disable this, you can do so in your web browser settings, or by opting out of cookies when you first visit our site (or first visit after a while).

Who we share your data with

We are not sharing your data with any third party organisations, apart from analytics data mentioned above. If you complete a booking through our website, you will be taken to our provider trybooking.com, where you will have to provide data in order to complete the booking. You can find their privacy policy here: https://www.trybooking.com/info/privacy

How long we retain your data

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

What rights you have over your data

If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

Where we send your data

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

Your contact information

If you have any privacy-specific concerns about using our website, please contact welcome@mpas.asn.au.