Information Collection and Use

General

The Cheesecake Shop (TCS) uses Non-Personal Information for the following general purpose: to customize the advertising and content you see, improve our services, conduct research, and provide anonymous reporting for internal and external clients.

Collection of Personal Information by Us

• When accessing our Website, certain information submitted by you may be retained by us. Submission of information will be transmitted to us via email, which in turn may be collected by a 3rd party. In addition, some of your contact details may be stored in a database online. The nature of personal information collected and stored by TCS is dependent on the types of services utilised and the personal information provided by you.
• Personal information which you provide may include (and is not limited to) your name, contact details, financial information and other personal information when seeking to apply as a franchisee (which may be provided directly to us or to any of our third party suppliers). Personal information may be given by you in a variety of circumstances including (but not limited to) circumstances where you request information from TCS or when you make contact with TCS. Further, if you're an existing franchisee, we will be able to view your personal information through our software application and hardware utilised by you as part of your operation of the franchise.

Orders

• If you purchase a product or service from us (or any of our franchisees), we will request certain personally identifiable Information from you on our order form. You must provide this contact information (such as your name, telephone number, email and shipping address) and financial information (such as a credit card number, the expiration date and the 3 digit security code or other banking details).
• This information is used by us for billing purposes and to fill your orders. If we have trouble processing an order, we will use this information to contact you.

How Your Personal Information will be Used

Choice/Opt-out

• We will provide you the opportunity to 'opt-out' of having your personally identifiable information used for certain purpose, when we ask for this information.
• If you no longer wish to receive our newsletter and promotional offers, you may “opt-out” of receiving them by following the instructions included in each newsletter or communication or by contacting us.
• You will be notified when your personally identifiable information is collected by any third party that is not our agent/service provider, so that you can make an informed choice as to whether or not to share your information with that party.

Access to Personal Information

• You may request to update, delete or access your personal information by contacting our privacy officer. You may be required to verify your identity, or we may require you to provide us with additional information about your request. Should we be permitted by law, we may refuse your request. Should we refuse a request, we will provide you with our reasons for doing so.
• In the event you seek to update the personal information being held by us and there is a dispute regarding any of the personal information, we will make a note of the particulars of the dispute on the personal information provided by you to us. In the event that you have created an account with TCS using our website, you are able to login to your account and view and/or update the personal information provided to us by you.
• Should you make a request for us to delete your personal information, please be advised that we may not be obliged to do so or be able to do so, especially in circumstances where your file holds personal information about other customers/clients of TCS.
• TCS reserves its right to charge you a reasonable administrative fee when considering your request.

Information Sharing and Disclosure

The Cheesecake Shop does not rent, trade, or share Personal Information with third parties except to provide products or services you've requested or when we have your permission or under the following circumstances:

• We use other third parties such as a shipping company to fulfil orders, a credit card processing company to bill you for goods sold on our Website, and an email service provider to send out emails on our behalf. When you make a purchase on our website or sign up for our email list, we will share the necessary amount of personally identifiable information as necessary for the third party to provide that service, including your name, address, credit card information and email address.
• We provide Non-Personal Information to interested third-parties for the purpose of understanding the usage patterns for certain content, services, advertisements, promotions, and/or functionality of the Website.
• To any entity, court or government body where we are obliged under law to disclose such information.
• To any person or entity which at the time of providing us with the personal information we have disclosed to you that we will provide that information to the named person or entity.

We may also seek to obtain personal or other information from some or all of the above so as to allow us to provide our products and services to you. We obtain this personal and other information from third parties under the assumption that you have made that third party aware of the intended purposes of us collecting, using and disclosing the personal or other information and that the third party has been made aware of your referral to us of them. It will be your responsibility to ensure that you have made the above disclosure to the relevant third party. Keep in mind that any personal information, or comment that you voluntarily disclose on the Website, for example on comment pages, or on the blog forums, become publicly available. Your account name is displayed to other Users when you send and/or post messages through the Website. Please note that any comment or other content you post or send to the Website becomes published content and is not considered personally identifiable information subject to this Privacy Policy.

Website Visit Information

Visiting our website requires the collection of general and personal information. The collection of such information may be executed by our third party contractors which collect information regarding your visit to website and includes the pages you accessed, the information downloaded, the date and time of your visit and your server address. Such information is collected for statistical purposes and assists us in keeping up the quality of our website and its convenience for our users.

Confidentiality and Security

• We follow generally accepted industry standards to protect the personally identifiable information submitted to us, both during transmission and once we receive it. No method of transmission over the Internet, or method of electronic storage, is 100% secure. Therefore, while we strive to use commercially acceptable means to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee its absolute security.
• We limit access to Personal Information about you to employees who we believe reasonably need to come into contact with Personal Information to provide products or services to you or in order to do their jobs.
• The security of your personal information is important to us.

International Users

• If you are accessing the Website from the European Union, Asia or New Zealand or any other region with laws or regulations that govern the collection of personal data or information, its use and disclosure which are different to Australian laws or our privacy policy as incorporated in our terms of use, then in that event, we wish to advise that by your use of the Website you will be transferring your personal information into Australia and that you consent to such transfer.
• Your connection to the Website will be through Australian servers and all personal and general information collected by us will be processed within Australia where TCS servers and internal systems are located.

Changes and Updates to this Privacy Policy

TCS may update this policy at any time in its sole discretion and without prior notice. We will strive to notify you about significant changes in the way we treat Personal Information by sending a notice to the primary email address specified in your TCS account and/or by placing a notice on the Website.

Cookies

• A cookie is a computer file containing certain information about your use of our website sent by your computer to us with each request. Cookies used by us and/or associated third parties may identify individual users.
• Cookies allow information to be stored on your computer and to be held on your browser’s memory. Most cookies either have an expiry date or cease to exist when you exist the Website and quite your browser.
• We use cookies so as to improve the functionality of the Website. Should you decide to reject our cookies some features of our website might cause errors and the functionality of our website will be reduced. Most internet browsers allow users to set the browser either to allow cookies or to reject them or to notify the user when a cookie is being used. It is important to note that our cookies do not hack into your computer so as to seek and retain other personal information stored on your computer nor do they contain any viruses.

Information Transfer across International Borders

• TCS has stores around Australia and New Zealand. Our network comprises of a number of stores, trained staff, trusted third party service providers and company officers. Given the size of our operation, we are sometimes required to provide your information to other related companies. This means that sometimes your information is transferred to a country that is not your country of residence or the country where you initially provided the information to us.
• Our privacy practice may vary among our countries of operation. All appropriate steps will be taken by us to ensure that your information is collected, stored and used in accordance with the legal requirements of the relevant country and through our privacy policy.

Complaints

We would encourage you to make direct contact with us should you not be satisfied with the way in which we have dealt with your personal information. Upon receipt of your complaint will reasonably attempt to deal with your complaint. Should you be of the view that our attempted resolution of complaint was not reasonable, you may refer your matter to the Office of the Federal Privacy Commissioner at website: www.privacy.gov.au or telephone 1500 363 992.

Links to External Websites

We have included links to external websites for your convenience. TCS is not aware of nor responsible for the content uploaded or the privacy practices of such external websites. It will be your responsibility to ensure that these websites comply with the relevant laws and privacy practices prior to your intended use of these websites

Effective Date

This Privacy Policy was last modified in January 2016