WEBSITE LEGAL & POLICY STATEMENTS

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DISCLAIMER

The information on this website is intended as a general reference. The Department of Veterans' Affairs (DVA) makes information available on the understanding that the Commonwealth is not thereby engaged in rendering professional advice.

DVA will make every reasonable effort to maintain current and accurate information. Users should carefully evaluate the accuracy, currency, completeness and relevance of this information for their purposes before relying on the material in any important matter. Users should always obtain any appropriate professional advice relevant to their particular circumstances.

DVA encourages you to check with us if you have any concern about the information on the website or if you require official printed copies of information from the website.

Links to other sites are provided for readers' convenience. DVA does not accept responsibility for information on any web site beyond our own. In some cases the material may incorporate or summarise views, standards or recommendations of third parties. Such material is assembled in good faith, but does not necessarily reflect the considered views of the Commonwealth, or indicate a commitment to a particular course of action.

To link your website to any part of the DVA web site you can request permission by contacting the Internet Manager.

COPYRIGHT

This work is copyright. You may download, display, print and reproduce this material in unaltered form only (retaining this notice) for your personal, non-commercial use or use within your organisation. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, all other rights are reserved.

Requests and inquiries concerning reproduction and rights should be addressed to Commonwealth Copyright Administration, Attorney General’s Department, Robert Garran Offices, National Circuit, Barton ACT 2600 or posted at http://www.ag.gov.au/cca

PRIVACY

In accordance with the Guidelines for Federal and ACT Government World Wide Websites issued by the Australian Privacy Commissioner, the Department of Veterans' Affairs (DVA) provides the following privacy statements.

Security of your information

DVA seeks to comply with the Information Privacy Principles under the Privacy Act 1988 (the Privacy Act) in the collection, storage, use and disclosure of personal information in its possession. The Privacy Act provides for specific rights and remedies of individuals in the event of a breach by the department of its duties under the act.

DVA provides a secure environment and a reliable system. However, you should be aware that there may be inherent risks associated with the transmission of information via the internet.

DVA Secure Web Services is designed to minimise these risks as much as possible, and provide a secure mechanism when seeking or providing personal information.

If you are seeking or providing information of a personal nature and you are not using DVA Secure Web Services, DVA suggests that you use over-the-counter, postal, fax or telephone services. Contact details for these services can be found on this website.

Some interactive services on this website may request personal information as part of the provision of the service. DVA encrypts all data transmitted between your computer's web browser and DVA's computers when you make use of any of these services. The encryption process used by DVA is secure socket layer (SSL). For SSL encryption to work, your browser must support SSL. Freely available browsers that support SSL include Netscape (version 3 or higher) and Microsoft Internet Explorer (version 4 or higher).

Note: External sites that are linked to the DVA site are outside DVA's control and you are advised to review their privacy and security statements when visiting those sites.

Site visit data

DVA makes a record of your visit and logs the following information for statistical purposes:

the user's server address
the user's top level domain name (e.g. .com, .gov, .au, .uk etc.)
the date and time of the visit to the site
the pages accessed and documents downloaded
the previous site visited
the type of browser used.

DVA will not make any attempt to identify users or their browsing activities except, in the unlikely event of an investigation, where a law enforcement agency may exercise a warrant to inspect the internet service provider's logs.

Cookies

A cookie is a collection of information, usually including a username and the current date and time, stored on the local computer of a person using the World Wide Web, used chiefly by websites to identify users who have previously registered or visited their site.

Cookies can be 'persistent' or 'session-based':

persistent cookies are stored on your computer, contain an expiration date, and may be used to track your browsing behaviour upon returning to the website from which the cookie was issued
session-based cookies are short-lived, are used only during a browsing session, and expire when you close your browser.

The DVA website (http://www.dva.gov.au) uses session cookies during a search query of the website. Our internet service provider has assured us that no cookies are employed on the website except for those associated with the search engine. Website statistics for the DVA website are generated from the web logs as outlined above under 'Site visit data'.

Once you have closed your browser, the session cookie set by the DVA website is destroyed and DVA does not maintain any personal information that might identify you should you visit our website at a later date.

The DVA secure website (https://secure.dva.gov.au) uses a session cookie to help manage the secure session. This cookie is set when the user logs into DVA Secure Web Services. Once you have closed your browser, the session cookie is destroyed and DVA does not maintain any personal information that might identify you should you use DVA Secure Web Services at a later stage.

DVA does not use persistent cookies on its websites.