Your privacy rights
Your personal information is protected by law, including the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) (Privacy Act) and the Australian Privacy Principles, which regulate how entities including IP Australia may collect, use, disclose and store personal information.
IP Australia will only collect your personal information where it is reasonably necessary for, or directly related to, the performance of our functions or activities.
What personal information do we collect?
We collect your personal information from you when you interact with the Contact Centre through:
- telephone services
- email (contact us form)
- live chat (pre-chat form).
The personal information we collect from you includes:
- personal name
- business/company details
- contact phone number
- contact email
- address
- postcode
- IP right number (if applicable).
All conversations on our telephone services are recorded, and our telephony channel uses an AI-powered Intelligent Voice Response (IVR) system to manage and route your calls more effectively.
Why do we collect your personal information?
We collect your personal information for the primary purpose of responding to your enquiry and for related secondary purposes, such as undertaking research and analysis of customer interactions.
This collection is authorised under the Privacy Act and is reasonably necessary for IP Australia to perform its business activities and any functions under relevant IP rights legislation.
How do we use and disclose your personal information?
We will use and disclose your personal information for the primary purpose of assisting you and responding to your Contact Centre enquiry, including:
- verifying the identity of an IP rights applicant, owner or legal representative
- assisting IP rights applicants, owners, or legal representatives to determine the status of IP rights
- submitting service requests
- accessing publicly available information related to an IP right.
In addition to the primary purpose, your personal information may also be used for secondary purposes including:
- studying patterns and trends in customer interactions to better understand how you use our services, including through targeted surveys and other feedback tools
- improving the way we deliver our services or products.
AI capabilities within the Contact Centre Service may use the personal information we collect to support the primary and secondary purposes described above.
Examples of AI use cases include:
- routing enquiries more efficiently to the appropriate channel
- providing insights to Contact Centre Service representatives based on your interactions with the Contact Centre.
We may also disclose your personal information to service providers engaged to assist us in delivering Contact Centre services. IP Australia uses a number of third-party providers to deliver our Contact Centre services.
- Probe CX operates our Contact Centre.
- Convai (part of Probe Group) provides the technology behind the Oration IVR system, which uses natural language processing. View the Probe CX and Convai privacy policy.
- Genesys Cloud supports our web messaging and stores transcripts and call recordings. View the Genesys Cloud privacy policy.
- Salesforce is our Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Platform and stores all records of interactions with the Contact Centre. View the Salesforce privacy policy.
Salesforce also provides the capability to draft responses to your enquiries through large language models (LLMs) for the email and chat channels. Find out more about Salesforce AI practices.
All data is stored in Australian data centres. Technical and support staff for the Oration platform are located in New Zealand and in limited circumstances, may access personal information for customer service support, maintenance and incident resolution.
This access occurs via secure systems hosted in Australia and IP Australia does not authorise offshore storage, hosting or processing of data.
While customer responses may be processed by LLMs that may operate outside of Australia, these models do not store any data. No personal information is retained offshore.
We may disclose your personal information to:
- relevant Australian Ministers with responsibility for intellectual property rights legislation and their offices
- the Department of Industry, Science and Resources and other Commonwealth government agencies
- relevant contractors providing services to the above parties.
We may need to disclose your personal information:
- where required by a House or a Committee of the Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia
- where required or authorised by a court or tribunal order, or under an Australian law.
For example, this could happen if IP Australia receives a court order compelling the production of information.
Google Analytics
We use Google Analytics on our website to collect details about the functions you use, search terms you enter, and your IP address.
We collect these details to improve the services available on our website.
Further information about Google Analytics, including how to opt-out, is set out in Google's privacy policy.
Further information
IP Australia's privacy policy explains how we handle and protect your personal information, including:
- how you can access and seek correction of personal information we hold about you
- how to contact IP Australia if you have any privacy questions or complaints, and how we will respond.
If you have any questions about this privacy collection notice, please contact us via:
Email: privacy@ipaustralia.gov.au
Mail: Privacy Officer
IP Australia
PO Box 200
Woden ACT 2606