Protecting your privacy and the confidentiality of your personal information is important to us, as it is fundamental to the way we conduct business.
Mercury Insurance is sensitive to privacy issues and treat very seriously the ongoing trust our customers have placed in us. You can relax knowing that Mercury Insurance aspire to Insurance Industry best practice procedures and believe we have robust systems in place for handling and protecting your private information.
Who is Allianz and Mercury Insurance?
Allianz is an Australian, wholly owned subsidiary of Allianz SE, one of the world's largest general insurance and financial service providers.
Mercury Insurance ("Mercury Insurance") are an authorised reprentative of Club Marine, that is an Allianz subsidiary specialising in marine insurance.
What is personal information?
Personal information is any information whereby your identity may be ascertained.
What is the purpose of the collection of your personal information?
Where it is possible we will collect personal information directly from you. The personal information collected and maintained by Mercury Insurance comprises your name, address, contact details and information specific to your product preference.
However, in some circumstances we will need to collect your personal information from third parties. These circumstances may include collection of your personal information from an insurance investigator or a medical practitioner for the purposes of assessing your claim under the insurance policy.
When you give personal information about other individuals, we and our agents rely on you to have made or make them aware:
- that you will or may provide their information to us;
- the types of third parties to whom the information may be provided;
- the relevant purposes we and the third parties will disclose it to, will use it for: and
- how they can access it.
We rely on you to have obtained their consent on these matters. If you have not done or will not do either of these things, you must tell us or our agents before you provide the relevant information.
For some policies we also collect and maintain your sensitive information. This comprises information about your health, membership of any trade unions or professional associations and any criminal convictions you may have.
The information requested allows us to assess risks, write and administer your insurance cover and claims.
If we do not collect your personal information we will not be able to do business with you.
Disclosure of your personal information to third parties
We disclose personal information to third parties who we believe are necessary to assist us and them in providing the relevant services and products. For example, in handling claims, we may have to disclose your personal and other information to third parties such as other insurers, reinsurers, loss adjusters, external claims data collectors, investigators, and agents or other parties as required by law. We limit the use and disclosure of any personal information provided by us to them to the specific purpose for which we supplied it.
In providing the relevant products and services to you, we may share your personal information with related companies within the Allianz Group.
Personal information for the purposes specified above may be shared on a confidential basis with:
- our related body corporates;
- our distributors and agents;
- other insurers and reinsurers;
- insurance reference bureaus;
- government agents;
- data collection and verification agencies;
- loss adjusters and assessors;
- repairers and suppliers;
- investigators and recovery agents;
- police, law and credit enforcement bodies and agencies;
- legal advisors;
- medical, health and case managers and service providers;
- actuaries and accountants;
- contracted advisors and service providers;
- professional and other organisations;
- your employer;
- other parties as required by law and/or
- the agent of any of these.
Direct marketing and your privacy
From time to time we may advise or offer you information on other Mercury Insurance products or services that may be relevant and of interest to you including offers relating to new engine products and those of Mercury Marine. If you do not wish to receive these offers or information, please complete our online "Opt Out" form below or call the Mercury Insurance Service Line - Freecall 1300 175 200. EST 9am-5pm, Mon-Fri.
Contacting us about access and correction of your personal information
Mercury Insurance aims to ensure that your personal information is accurate, up to date and complete. Please contact us on 1300 175 200 EST 9am - 5pm, Mon-Fri if you would like to seek access to, or revise your personal information or feel that the information we currently have on record is incorrect or incomplete.
If you believe that the privacy of your personal information at Mercury Insurance has been interfered with, you may lodge a complaint by contacting us on 1300 175 200 EST 9am - 5pm, Mon-Fri or in writing to Corporate Compliance, Mercury Insurance, 40 The Esplanade, Brighton, Victoria, 3186. Your complaint will be managed and resolved through our internal Privacy Complaint Procedure.
If however, you are not satisfied with the way Mercury Insurance have handled your complaint you may contact the Office of the Federal Privacy Commissioner ("OFPC") on 1300 363 392.
Website Privacy Statement
In the course of using our sites you may provide Mercury Insurance with personal information. We will use all reasonable measures to protect any such information from being used for any other purpose other than the provision of Mercury Insurance and associated products from Mercury Marine or any Related Bodies Corporates insurance products or services.
Data transmitted over the Internet
Unfortunately, no data transmission over the Internet can be guaranteed as totally secure. Accordingly, although Mercury Insurance strives to protect such information, we cannot ensure or warrant the security of any information you transmit to us or from our online products or services and you do so at your own risk. Once we receive your transmission, we take reasonable steps to preserve the security of the information in our own systems.
If you decide to complete an online application form, the information that you enter into the online form will only be collected by us if you submit your online application. If at any stage you cancel your application prior to submitting your application, the information you have entered up to that point will be automatically deleted.
Advertising and tracking
We may collect information about your visit to our site to assist us with measuring and improving our website. Examples of information that we collect include day and time of your visit, whether you have visited our website previously, whether you used a search engine to find us and some geographical information about what country and state you are in.
We use Site Intelligence to collect visitor information so that we can better understand how to improve our products and services to you. One of the primary methods used by this tool is the placement of cookies. Cookies are small information files that an end user's Web browser places on that user's computer when a Website is visited. For information on disabling these cookies, please go to the privacy settings section within your browser. In addition to the session cookie, Site Intelligence uses other data collection methods such as appending query strings to an image request. However, at no other point is the data collected within Site Intelligence sent overseas or shared with 3rd parties and all data is securely stored by Allianz.
We also use other external companies for the following purposes:
- For webhosting services for this website,
- To gather non-personal information (using cookies) in order to evaluate the effectiveness of online marketing activities, for example.
We will retain the content of any e-mail that you send us, if we believe that we have a legal requirement to do so. Your e-mail message content may be monitored by our employees for security issues including where e-mail abuse is suspected; our response to you may be monitored for quality assurance issues.
SPAM
SPAM means unsolicited advertising material sent via email. Mercury Insurance do not send this type of communication. If you have provided your email address to Mercury Insurance we may however use this to promote our products, where you have indicated your permission to do so. If you receive an email from Mercury Insurance at any time and no longer wish to receive this type of communication, you can forward an email, including the email address from whom you received your email, to unsubscribe@allianz.com.au. We will then remove your email from our records within 5 business days of receiving your instructions.
Site linking policy
We may include links to external sites that we consider contain information relevant to the information that you were seeking with us. Where these links occur, we accept no responsibility for the accuracy of the content of those sites or your reliance on any information contained within any such site.