Privacy Notice

STIHL Pty Ltd Privacy Policy

ANDREAS STIHL AG & Co. KG (‘STIHL’) and its related bodies corporate, including STIHL Pty Ltd (we, our, us) are committed to protecting your privacy and personal information.

Your rights to privacy are also protected by the Australian Privacy Principles in force under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) (Privacy Act). The Privacy Act place strict requirements on us to treat certain personal information collected as confidential, to store your personal information securely and to allow you easy access to check and correct your personal information. This policy explains the nature and scope of how STIH processes your personal information.

This policy applies to personal information collected from our customers, users of our website (www.stihl.com.au), job seekers, visitors to our premises, STIHL dealers, suppliers, and other parties such as prospective STIHL dealers.  This policy does not apply to personal information collected from STIHL employees and users of STIHL Academy AU. Such collection is dealt under the STIHL Employee Privacy Policy and STIHL Academy Privacy Policy respectively.

1. What is your personal information?
When used in this privacy policy, the term “personal information” has the meaning given to it in the Privacy Act.

Generally, it is any information that can be used to personally identify you. This may include your name, address, telephone number, email address and profession or occupation. If the information we collect personally identifies you, or you are reasonably identifiable from it, the information will be considered personal information.

2.  What information do we collect?
We may collect the following information from you:

• your name and contact details, such as your physical address, email address, phone number;
• your company name (if applicable) and associated contact details including physical address and phone number;
• information about your shopping preferences and selections such as the products you have viewed or added to your shopping cart on our website;
• information about your subscription to our newsletters, and your interaction with our newsletters;
• details of the products and services you have purchased from a STIHL dealership or our website, including your transaction history and current or pending transactions;
• details of products and services which you have enquired about, together with any additional information necessary to deliver those products and services and to respond to your enquiries;
• payment information in order to allow our third party payment processors to process payments;
• video surveillance recording of you if you are visiting one of our offices or warehouses;
• information to enable us to assess prospective STIHL dealers including financial information, trade references and a credit report;
• any additional information relating to you that you provide to us directly through our websites or indirectly through use of our websites or online presence, through our representatives or otherwise;
• information you provide to us through our Customer Service Centre, customer surveys or visits to our STIHL dealers from time to time; and
• details pertaining to any injury or illness and the medical treatment administered due to the use of a STIHL Product.

We may also collect some information that is not personal information because it does not identify you or anyone else. For example, we may collect anonymous answers to surveys or aggregated information about how users use our website.

3. How do we collect personal information?
When we collect personal information we will, where appropriate and where possible, explain to you why we are collecting the information and how we plan to use it. We may collect personal information from you in the following circumstances, if you:

• purchase any products from a STIHL dealer (including through our website);
• visit our website(s) we may collect the name of the operating system, the name of the domain from which you access the internet; the internet browser used to access our website, the internet address of your device, the name of your access provider, the date and time you access our site; the pages accessed and the documents downloaded; and the internet address of the website from which you linked directly to our site;
• receive our online newsletter and you open the newsletter or click on any of its links;
• complete any questionnaires and surveys;
• sign up to any of our mailing lists;
• create an online account;
• reserve or purchase a product online on our website;
• participate in a competition or promotion;
• submit a contact us form;
• sign-in when visiting our premises and/or for occupational health and safety induction purposes;
• apply to us for a STIHL dealership;
• interact with STIHL Australia or STIHL TIMBERSPORTS® via social networks;
• contact our customer service team;
• contact our product liability and compliance advisor;
• during conversations between you and our representatives, including our dealers, or customer service team;
• when you register your purchase with our STIHL dealers.

Where reasonable and practicable to do so, we will collect your personal information only from you. However, in some circumstances we may be provided with information by third parties. For example, we may collect personal information about you from our STIHL dealers.

We will not actively identify users of our websites or their browsing activities, except where we are required to do so by law, a warrant or a court order.

4. Cookies
We may also collect information on our websites, including your personal information, through the use of cookies.

We use cookies to enable functionality, protect the website, gain statistics and information about website use, and to support marketing and online advertisement purposes. We also use cookies to improve your experience of our websites. In addition, some functions of our website are provided by third parties who use cookies. You can find out about the cookies used on our website by reading our Cookie Notice.

Some of the cookies we use are deleted after the end of the browser session. Other cookies remain on your terminal device and enable us or our partner companies to recognise your browser the next time you visit us (also called long-term cookies). Cookies may not necessarily include your personal information.

Web analytics and tracking
Our website utilises a number of web analytic and tracking services provided by third parties. These services employ various technologies, including cookies, to enable analysis of the use of our website. As part of the services, the third parties may collect various anonymous information about the use of our website, and provide analytics and reports to us, our overseas related bodies corporate or other web analytics and tracking service providers engaged by us. For more information on web analytics and tracking see our Cookie Notice.

Our online newsletter system implements web beacon technologies which will allow us to know when and how you open and interact with our newsletters. We analyse this information so that we can better tailor our newsletters to your individual interests.

We use Google Analytics Advertising Features to promote our products and services. Google and other third parties collect data about traffic to our website via advertising cookies and identifiers. This enables Google to display ads on other sites that are relevant to you, based on your visits to our website. We do not control the use of data collected by Google and other third parties. If you would like to prevent your data from being used by Google Analytics, please click here: https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout. 

We use Tealium Audience Stream, a service provided by Tealium Inc, who provide us with a Customer Data Platform which enables us to build visitor profiles and create audience segments. This visitor data may be forwarded to other third-party service providers that we engage, who use the data for interest-based advertising. If you would like to prevent your data from being used by Tealium Audience Stream, please click here https://docs.tealium.com/iq-tag-management/consent/consent-management/privacy-banner-and-popup/manage/

5. What happens if we cannot collect your personal information?
If you do not provide us with the personal information described above, some or all of the following may happen:

• we or our STIHL dealers may not be able to provide the requested products or services to you, either to the same standard or at all;
• we may not be able to register your warranty with us;
• you may not be able to deliver services at our premises for occupational health and safety reasons;
• we may not be able to assess your application for employment with us, or your application to work with us as a STIHL dealer;
• we or our STIHL dealers may not be able to provide you with information about products and services that you may want, including information about discounts, sales or special promotions;
• certain features of our website may not function properly; or
• we may be unable to tailor the content of our websites to your preferences.

6. Why do we collect, hold, use and disclose your personal information?
We collect, use and disclose your personal information to assist us in performing our business activities and functions as set out below.

• to determine your product, service preferences and preferred STIHL dealership;
• to promote our products and services that may be of interest to you (including direct marketing);
• to manage your requests for products or services, including online reservations or purchases, entry in to competitions and discount coupons;
• to communicate with you about equipment servicing reminders, your warranty registration or equipment recalls;
• to resolve disputes that you may have with us or a STIHL dealership in relation to products that you have purchased;
• to enable you to sign-in when visiting our premises and/or for safety induction purposes;
• to enable you to apply to us for a STIHL dealership;
• to assess the performance of the website, sales performance and to improve the operation of the website;
• to assess the performance of our newsletters and to improve the content of our newsletters and tailor the content to your interests;
• for administrative, marketing, planning, product or service development, quality control and research purposes, including customer surveys, of us, our related bodies corporate, contractors or service providers;
• to provide marketing and remarketing through our websites, social media channels and other marketing mediums;
• to update our records and keep your contact details up to date;
• to process and respond to any complaint made by you;
• to process payments and credit checks when you purchase a product on our website;
• to provide refunds and exchanges and undertakings and administer product recalls; and 
• to mandatorily report to the ACCC in the case of an incident or accident caused by the use of a STIHL Product;
• to report to the legal team and product integrity team in the parent company any incident or accident caused by the use of a STIHL product.

Payment processing
When you purchase online through our website, we collect payment information such as bank and credit card details via our third party payment processors, using our secure online payment processing system.

Direct marketing
We will carry out direct marketing in accordance with all applicable laws. You may opt-out of receiving direct marketing from us through the unsubscribe link function made available to you with each direct marketing communication from us.

Except for STIHL dealers, we do not provide your personal information to other organisations for the purposes of direct marketing by those organisations.

STIHL dealers
Our dealers are separate legal entities and businesses from STIHL. Dealers may utilise their individual customer database to record warranty information and online purchases, and they may also use their own direct marketing systems.  We may share your information with STIHL dealers to enable them to fulfil your purchase order or to provide you with services (including for example, where you make a purchase from a STIHL dealer on our website).

We are not responsible or liable for any communications that may be sent directly by a dealer to you. If you receive communications from a STIHL dealer and no longer wish to receive these communications from that dealer, you must opt-out of the STIHL dealer communication by using the unsubscribe facility of that STIHL dealer.

7. Holding and disclosure of personal information
We may hold and disclose your personal information to our associated entities located overseas, including the parent company of STIHL in Germany. Some information may be collected directly by these overseas entities.

Sometimes we use third party platforms and services to store and analyse data and information, send marketing messages, or to otherwise provide services to us in relation to the purpose for which the information was collected for example our third party payment processors. Some of these services are hosted and managed by organisations other than ourselves.

We use products and services maintained in countries overseas including the United States, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Poland, India, Japan, Ireland, Brazil and Singapore.

We take reasonable steps to ensure that the overseas recipients of your personal information do not breach privacy obligations relating to your personal information.

We may disclose your personal information to:

• our employees, related bodies corporate, contractors or service providers including, without limitation, web hosting providers, IT systems administrators, mailing houses, couriers, payment processors, data entry service providers, electronic network administrators, customer research agencies, database management providers, debt collectors, and professional advisors such as accountants, solicitors, business advisors and consultants;
• suppliers, STIHL dealers and other third parties with whom we have commercial relationships, for business, marketing, and related purposes; and
• any organisation for any authorised purpose with your express consent.

We will not sell or trade your personal information to third parties for their marketing purposes, but we may share personal information with our STIHL dealers for the purpose of providing products and services to you.

We may combine or share any information that we collect from you with information collected by any of our related bodies corporate.

8. Security
We take reasonable steps to ensure your personal information is protected from misuse and loss and from unauthorised access, modification, interference or disclosure. We may hold your information in either electronic or hard copy form.

As the internet is inherently insecure, we cannot provide any assurance regarding the security of transmission of information you communicate to us online. Accordingly, any personal information or other information which you transmit to us online is transmitted at your own risk.

When managing changes to information handling we undertake privacy impact assessments (PIAs), if those changes meet the requirement for a PIA. A PIA helps us to protect your personal information by assessing, eliminating and/or managing privacy risks.

9. Links
Our website may contain links to other sites. If you access any third-party website from our website, personal information about you may be collected by that third party’s website. We are not responsible for ensuring the protection of any of your information collected from any such third-party website. We encourage you to be aware of when you leave our website and to read the privacy policies for every third-party website that you access.

10. Disposal of your personal information
We process your data on our systems to the extent that this is necessary to fulfil the above-mentioned purposes or if there are statutory retention obligations. We will take reasonable steps to delete your data after these periods have expired.

11. Access to your personal information
You can access or request amendment to your information at any time by contacting us.

If you would like to know what information we hold about you please contact our Data Privacy Officer. There may be instances where we cannot grant you access to the personal information we hold. For example, we may need to refuse access if granting access would interfere with the privacy of others or if it would result in a breach of confidentiality. If that happens, we will give you written reasons for any refusal.

We may ask you to verify your identity to ensure that personal information we hold is not improperly accessed.

Where we decide not to make a requested amendment and you disagree, you may request a note of your requested correction to be added to your personal information that explains your correction request.

12. Privacy complaints process and enquiries
If you believe that your privacy has been breached, please contact our Data Privacy Officer.

We aim to ensure that your complaint is resolved in a timely manner and request complaints about breaches of privacy are made in writing, so we can be sure about the details of the complaint.

We will treat your requests or complaints confidentially.  Our representative will contact you within 14 days to acknowledge receipt of your enquiry. 

After we have completed our enquiries, we will contact you, to advise the outcome and invite your response.

If you are not satisfied with the way your privacy-related complaint is handled by us, you may refer your complaint to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC). Details of how to lodge a complaint with the OAIC may be found at www.oaic.gov.au or by calling 1300 363 992.

13. Contacting Us:
Our Data Privacy Officer can be contacted at:

STIHL Pty Ltd
by post: 5 Kingston Park Court, Knoxfield VIC 3185
by email: privacy@stihl.com.au
Telephone: (03) 9215 6666

14. Policy updates
This policy may change from time to time.  The updated policy will be published on our website.

This privacy policy was last updated in August of 2024.

© 2024 STIHL Pty Ltd. All rights reserved.