Privacy policy
What personal information AWI collects, why, where it is held, who can see it, and how to get a copy or have it corrected. Written to be read rather than to be defensible.
The principle this policy is built on
A professional body has legitimate reasons to hold personal information about its members and certificate holders. It has almost no reason to publish it.
So the site is built with a hard separation. The public website carries no personal data at all. Credential information, and only credential information, is held on the AWI register. Everything else lives behind a login, in the member portal, and there is no public member directory and no public interface that will return a list of people.
What AWI collects, and why
| Information | Why AWI needs it | Public? |
|---|---|---|
| Name | To issue membership and certification in the correct name | On a certificate, on verification of that certificate, and on the register if you opt in |
| Email address | Receipts, renewal notices, and the bulletin if you ask for it | Never |
| Postal address | To post certificates and wallet cards | Never |
| Phone number | Optional. To resolve a question on an application | Never |
| Employer and position | Optional. Corporate seat allocation, and industry statistics in aggregate | Never, unless you choose to publish it on your register listing |
| Qualifications and experience | To assess a certification application against the scheme rules | Never. The certificate that results is public; the evidence behind it is not |
| Certification records | To maintain the register, and to answer verification requests | Scheme, categories, range, dates and status only |
| Payment details | To take payment | Never. Card details are handled by the payment provider and are not stored by AWI |
AWI does not collect sensitive information as defined in the Privacy Act, and does not ask for government identifiers.
What the register holds
These are the only two public routes to information about a person, and both are deliberately narrow.
The register holds the certificate number, the holder’s name, the scheme, the categories and range, the issue date, the expiry date and the current status. It holds nothing else. There is no public lookup at present. When one is built it will require the certificate number and the surname together, it will be rate limited, and a wrong surname will return exactly the same response as a certificate number that does not exist, so it cannot be used to discover which certificate numbers are real or to build a list of names.
The register lists only people who have chosen to be listed, and shows credential information. No date of birth, no street address, no phone number and no email, and no employer unless the person has specifically chosen to publish it. Listings can be removed at any time, immediately.
Where it is held and who can see it
- Member and certification records are held in an authenticated member portal, separate from this public website. There is no public interface to them and no public application programming interface that returns them.
- Access is limited to AWI administration for the purpose of administering membership and assessing certification.
- Assessment evidence is subject to the AWI confidentiality policy. Governance documents.
- Training providers hold their own records of your training and examination. Those are their records, under their own privacy policies, and AWI receives the results rather than the underlying assessment material.
When AWI discloses information
AWI discloses personal information only where one of these applies:
- you have asked for it, for example by opting in to the register or asking AWI to confirm your certification to an employer
- it is required to administer your membership or certification, such as passing a name to a training organisation for an examination booking
- it is required or authorised by law
AWI does not sell personal information, does not rent mailing lists, and does not disclose member lists to sponsors.
Communications
Consent to marketing is kept separate from membership. You can be a member and receive nothing but receipts and renewal notices. The bulletin and any other communication is a choice you make and can reverse, and every message carries a working unsubscribe.
If you joined under the older membership terms, those said you agreed to receive information from AWI. That is no longer the position. Consent to marketing is separate from membership, and withdrawing it changes nothing about your membership or your certification. The terms of membership.
Getting a copy, or a correction
You can ask what personal information AWI holds about you, and ask for it to be corrected if it is wrong. Contact AWI and choose Privacy. AWI will confirm your identity before releasing anything, for the obvious reason.
You can also ask AWI to delete information it no longer needs. Certification records are the exception worth explaining: AWI keeps a record of certificates it has issued, including expired and withdrawn ones, because the integrity of a register depends on it being complete. If you ask to be removed, your register listing goes immediately and the certification record stays.
Cookies and analytics
This site sets no advertising cookies and carries no advertising or social media tracking. Fonts are served from this site, not from a third party, so loading a page tells nobody but AWI that you were here.
AWI does not currently run analytics on this site. If that changes, this section names the tool before it goes on, no analytics cookie is set until you accept, and declining changes nothing about how the site works for you.
If you think AWI has got this wrong
Tell AWI first. Contact AWI and choose Privacy, and set out what happened. If you are not satisfied with the response you can take a privacy complaint to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.
Who this policy is by
This policy is issued by Australian Welding Institute Ltd, ABN 23 143 030 899. Privacy enquiries go to graham.fry@welding.org.au, or by post to the address on the contact page.
This is version 1.0. Changes are recorded at the foot of this page with the date and one line on what changed, so you can see what moved rather than being told the policy was updated.