HNSA Privacy Policy

The Historical Novel Society Australasia (HNSA) values your privacy. This policy discloses the privacy practices for our Website under requisite Australian law which governs not-for-profit organisations.

Definitions

‘HNSA Newsletter’ means the HNSA News & Interviews newsletter.

‘HNSA News & Updates’ is a webpage on our Website devoted to streaming news, interviews, and articles about historical fiction.

‘Imagining the Past’ is an interview podcast series presented by HNSA on Audioboom.

‘Personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person; in particular reference to an identifier such as a name, location data, IP address or email.

‘Subscriber’ means a person who has consented to receive the HNSA Newsletter.

‘Visitor’ means an individual who views pages at the Website.

‘Website’ means www.hnsa.org.au

Who are we?

HNSA is a not-for-profit incorporated association and registered charity which promotes the writing, reading and publication of historical fiction, especially in Australia and New Zealand, primarily through running biennial conferences. We are the owner of the Website which is used to promote our conferences and speakers as well as share information about writing, history, inspiration and historical fiction via the HNSA Newsletter, HNSA News & Interviews, and Imagining the Past. Access to information held on the site is restricted to committee members and our service provider The Studio Creative.

Access and retention of data

Social media features

We use social media features such as social media share buttons and social media widgets to enable you to access platforms such as X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Youtube and Audioboom. These features may collect your browsing information including your IP address and the page you are visiting on our website, and set cookies to enable the feature to function correctly. As social media widgets are hosted by third parties on our website, your interactions with them will be governed by the privacy policies of the third party organisations providing the widgets. For example, if you choose to ‘like’ or ‘share’ information on a post or page through these services, you should review the privacy policy of that service. If you are a member of a social media site, the interfaces may allow the social media site to connect your visits to my site with other personal information.

HNSA Newsletter and Mailerlite 

Mailerlite is a third-party newsletter management tool used widely by community groups, business and government. We use Mailerlite as our automation platform to manage email subscriptions and newsletter campaigns.

The embedded subscriber form on the HNSA website enabling you to sign up to our HNSA Newsletter is linked to Mailerlite. When subscribing to the HNSA Newsletter, the information you provide is transferred to Mailerllite for processing. Mailerlite stores information about subscribers including first and last name, email address, method of sign up, and details of interactions with email newsletter campaigns.

Mailerlite may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third party tracking, and monitor your interaction with the embedded content, including tracing your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account or are logged into that website. This service is governed by Mailerlite’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service..

Google Analytics

We use Google Analytics, a service which transmits website traffic data to Google servers in the United States. Google Analytics does not identify individual users or associate your IP address with any other data held by Google. Information retained by Google Analytics is anonymised and only kept for 26 months.

By using our website, you consent to the processing of data about you by Google in the manner described in Google’s Privacy Policy  and for the purposes set out above. You can opt out of Google Analytics if you disable or refuse the cookies, disable JavaScript, or use the opt-out service provided by Google.

Use and sharing of your data

We only use the personal data collected by Mailerlite and Squarespace to send out Newsletters. We use reports provided by Google Analytics to enhance our understanding of what subscribers are looking for, and to track performance, security and usability.

Except in the case of Giveaways (see below), we do not share your personal data with any third parties other than The Studio Creative, solely for the purpose of maintaining the website and newsletter.

Giveaways

When visitors leave comments on a News & Updates website post to enter a giveaway, HNSA collects the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user string to help spam detection. An anonymised 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 at https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment by a Committee member, your profile picture is available to the public in the context of your comment. If you leave a comment, your comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely so we can recognise and approve any follow up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

We will always ask the winner of a giveaway for their permission to share their email address with the author or publisher who is offering a prize.

If you leave a comment 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.

You can control or delete cookies already on your computer and you can set most browsers to prevent them from being placed. If you do this, however, you may have to manually adjust some preferences every time you visit a site and some services and functionalities may not work. Visit your browser’s help information to find out how to do this.

Rights over your data

If you have left comments on our News & Interviews stream, or have signed up for the HNSA Newsletter, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any information we’re obliged to keep for legal or security purposes or which we believe we should retain for a legitimate purpose

If you wish to unsubscribe from the HNSA Newsletter then you may click the link in the footer of the newsletter email.

If you wish your personal data deleted from the News & Interviews stream or at Mailerlite, please email contact@hnsa.org.au

Services we link to

We provide direct links to book product pages on various retail sites to enable visitors to purchase books directly from those booksellers, and promote work by our conference speakers and prize winners. There may also be links to other websites such as online research resources and review sites. We are not responsible for the privacy practices employed by those websites including their content and information. When you click on those links you are moving to a third party website or service, and our privacy policy does not apply to them. Please review their policies for how they collect, manage and use your browsing interactions, and your personal data.

Stripe

HNSA uses Stripe as its online ticket selling portal. When you click through to Stripe, you are moving to a third party website and service and our privacy policy does not apply to it. This is governed by the Stripe Privacy Policy. Please review its policy for how collect, manage and use your browsing interactions, and your personal data.

Changes to our Privacy Policy

Our Privacy Policy may change from time to time and all updates will be effective once posted on this page. If you feel that we are not abiding by this privacy policy, you should contact us immediately at contact@hnsa.org.au