Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

This site is operated by Safestyle Holdings Pty Ltd, trading as SafeStyle. We are the organisation responsible for the personal information described in this policy — the APP entity under Australian law and the agency under New Zealand law.

Our head office address is for correspondence. It is not a deliveries or returns address — please contact us before sending anything.

2. Which privacy law applies to you

This one site serves customers in two countries, so two sets of rules are relevant.

• If you are in Australia, the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the thirteen Australian Privacy Principles apply to how we handle your personal information.
• If you are in New Zealand, the Privacy Act 2020 and its thirteen Information Privacy Principles apply. They apply to us even though we are an Australian company, because we carry on business in New Zealand.
• If both could apply, or you are somewhere else entirely, we apply whichever standard gives you more protection and handle your information according to this policy either way.

Wherever this policy uses the phrase personal information, read it as covering both “personal information” in the Australian and New Zealand sense.

3. What this policy covers

This policy covers this trade site and the accounts, voucher requests, orders, invoices and payments handled through it.

It does not cover:

• Our consumer stores at safestyle.com.au and safestyle.co.nz. They use a different set of tools and publish their own privacy policy, which is longer than this one because those sites carry analytics and advertising technology that this site does not.
• Optometry practices and other independent businesses. A practice that measures, dispenses and fits your eyewear is a separate business with its own privacy obligations and its own policy.
• Your employer. Where your employer funds your eyewear, what they do with their own records is governed by their privacy policy, not ours.

4. The information we collect

We only ask for what we actually need. Not every category below will apply to you — someone browsing the catalogue gives us far less than someone submitting a voucher request.

If a field is optional and you would rather not answer it, leave it out and tell us — we will work around it where the order allows.

5. Prescription and vision information

This is the most sensitive information on the site, so it gets its own section.

It is health information

Your prescription, and your answers about your vision, are sensitive information under Australian privacy law and information about your health under New Zealand privacy law. That means we collect it only with your consent, use it only for the purpose you gave it for, and limit who inside SafeStyle can see it to the people handling your order.

Why we need it

Prescription safety eyewear cannot be made without it. The questionnaire determines which lens design, tint and coating suit the work you do — a lens that is right for a night-shift driver is wrong for a welder. The prescription itself determines how the lenses are ground.

Consent, and taking it back

Submitting a voucher request or a prescription order is how you consent to us handling this information for that order. You can withdraw that consent at any time by contacting us, though we may not be able to complete or continue an order once you do. Withdrawing consent does not affect records we are required to keep, such as the invoice for eyewear already supplied.

6. What your employer can see

Where your employer funds your eyewear under a contract with us, the employer contacts who administer that contract sign in to this site to review and approve requests. We want to be plain about what they can see, because people are often surprised by it.

The people administering your employer’s contract can see, for each request made under it:

• Your first and last name, your work email address and your employee or payroll reference.
• The date of your request and its status — pending, approved, declined or cancelled.
• Your answers to the vision and work questionnaire described in section 4.
• The lens type, tint and coating recommended for you and the one chosen.
• The practice you selected and the price quoted.
• Any copy of your written prescription uploaded with the request, which they can open.

They see this because they are being asked to approve spending against a workplace eyewear entitlement and, in most cases, because workplace health and safety obligations sit with them. They see only requests made under their own contract, never another employer’s.

7. Why we use your information

We use personal information to:

• Open, verify and administer trade accounts, and give the right people access to the right pricing, orders and invoices.
• Process voucher requests, route them to the right employer contact for approval, and issue or cancel vouchers.
• Specify, manufacture, fit, dispatch and deliver prescription and non-prescription eyewear.
• Take payment, issue invoices, statements and credits, and follow up amounts owing.
• Answer enquiries, handle warranty claims, remakes and returns, and provide support.
• Keep the site secure and available, and investigate faults, misuse and fraud.
• Meet our legal obligations, including tax, financial record-keeping, consumer guarantees and product safety.
• Send you trade updates about products and stock, where you have asked for them or where they relate to an account you administer.

We do not use personal information for advertising, profiling or audience building, and we do not combine it with data bought from third parties.

8. Who we share it with

We disclose personal information only where it is needed to run this site and fill your order. Each provider below is bound by contract to use the information only for the service they provide to us.

We may also disclose personal information to our professional advisers, and where we are required or permitted to by law — for example in response to a court order or a lawful request from a regulator, or to protect someone’s safety. If SafeStyle is ever sold or restructured, account records may transfer to the buyer, who would be bound to handle them under a policy no less protective than this one.

9. Sending information overseas

As the table above shows, some of our providers are outside Australia and New Zealand — mainly in the United States and the European Union. Using them means your information may be stored or processed overseas.

Before we engage a provider that will hold personal information we take reasonable steps to satisfy ourselves that it will be handled to a standard comparable to the one the law requires of us, and we put contractual protections in place to that effect. If you are in New Zealand, this is the disclosure required by Information Privacy Principle 12. If you are in Australia, it is the disclosure required by Australian Privacy Principle 8.

New Zealand customers should also note that SafeStyle is an Australian company, so your information will be held in Australia as a matter of course.

10. Cookies and tracking

This site sets only the cookies it needs to let you through the site password, keep you signed in, hold your cart and complete a payment, plus a small number of local browser settings that remember your preferences, such as how wide you have dragged the cart panel, whether you have folded its order summary down, and whether you prefer products shown as a grid or a list. There is no Google Analytics, no tag manager, no advertising pixel, no session recording and no heat mapping on this site, which is why you are not asked to accept cookies when you arrive.

Our Cookie Policy lists every cookie and storage key by name, what each does and how long it lasts.

11. Marketing

We may send trade updates — new products, stock and range changes, price lists and point-of-sale material — to the contacts nominated on a trade account, because that is information those people need to do their job. Every message includes a way to unsubscribe, and you can also ask us to stop at any time by emailing enquiries@safestyle.com.au. We will act on the request promptly.

Unsubscribing from marketing does not stop transactional messages you need, such as order confirmations, dispatch notices, invoices, statements and voucher approvals.

We do not market to employees who submit voucher requests on the strength of that request, and we never use prescription or questionnaire information to target anything at you.

12. Automated decisions

Two parts of this site work things out automatically, and in both cases a person makes the actual decision.

• Voucher eligibility. When you start a request we check automatically whether your employer’s contract still has entitlement available and whether you have claimed recently. This only tells you whether you may submit a request. Approval is a human decision made by your employer.
• Lens recommendation. Your questionnaire answers produce a recommended lens, tint and coating. It is a recommendation, not a determination — you and the dispensing optometrist decide what is actually made, and clinical judgement sits with the optometrist.

We do not make decisions about you by wholly automated means that have legal or similarly significant effects.

13. Keeping information secure

We take reasonable steps to protect personal information from misuse, loss, and unauthorised access, modification or disclosure. In practice that means the site is served only over encrypted connections; sign-in sessions are short-lived and their cookies cannot be read by scripts in the page; access to accounts, orders and prescription records inside SafeStyle is restricted to staff who need it for their role; card details are handled entirely by our payment provider on its own pages; and our systems sit behind a network that filters attack and bot traffic.

No system is perfectly secure, so we also plan for failure. If a data breach occurs that is likely to cause you serious harm, we will notify you and the relevant regulator as the law requires. If you think your sign-in has been compromised, or you have received something from us that looks wrong, please tell us straight away.

14. How long we keep it

We keep personal information only as long as we need it for the purpose we collected it for, or as long as the law requires — whichever is longer. As a guide:

• Order, invoice and payment records are kept for at least seven years, because tax and financial record-keeping law requires it.
• Prescription and voucher records are kept while the order is being made and afterwards for as long as needed to support warranty claims, remakes and repeat orders.
• Account and contact details are kept while the account is active, and for a period afterwards in case it is reopened.
• Enquiries are kept for as long as needed to deal with them and to understand a later related enquiry.

When information is no longer needed we destroy it or de-identify it. If you would like to know how long we hold a particular record, ask us and we will tell you.

15. Your rights

Under both Australian and New Zealand law you can:

• Ask what we hold and get a copy of it. We will confirm whether we hold personal information about you and give you access to it.
• Ask us to correct it. If something is wrong, out of date, incomplete or misleading, tell us and we will fix it. If we disagree, you can ask us to attach a statement of the correction you sought.
• Ask us to delete it, where we no longer need it and no law requires us to keep it.
• Withdraw consent, including consent to handle your prescription and questionnaire answers.
• Opt out of marketing, at any time.
• Deal with us without identifying yourself, where that is lawful and practicable — for example browsing the catalogue or asking a general question.
• Complain, to us and then to a regulator. See section 16.

How to make a request

Email enquiries@safestyle.com.au or write to the postal address in section 1, and tell us what you are after. Requests are free. We will need to verify who you are before releasing anything — not to make life difficult, but because handing your information to the wrong person would be a far worse outcome. We only use what you give us for verification to verify you.

We aim to respond quickly and in any case within the time the law allows — 30 days in Australia and 20 working days in New Zealand. If we need longer we will tell you why. If we refuse a request, we will explain our reasons and how to challenge the decision.

16. Complaints

If you think we have mishandled your personal information, please tell us first — email enquiries@safestyle.com.au with the details. We will acknowledge your complaint, look into it properly, and write back with what we found and what we intend to do about it.

If you are not satisfied with our response, you can take it to the regulator:

• In Australia — the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, at oaic.gov.au or 1300 363 992.
• In New Zealand — the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, at privacy.org.nz or 0800 803 909.

17. Children

This is a trade site for businesses and their staff. It is not intended for children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has given us information, contact us and we will delete it.

18. Changes to this policy

We update this page when what we do with personal information changes, and we revise the date at the top when we do. If a change is significant — a new category of information, a new disclosure, or a new purpose — we will tell account holders directly rather than relying on you to notice. Where a change needs your consent, we will ask for it before the change affects you.

19. Contact us

For anything about this policy, or about the information we hold on you, get in touch and we will be glad to help.