How we keep your information safe:

After the recent cyber attacks here in Australia and news stories on Cyber Crime, we thought it was important to let you know how we keep your information safe.

If the likes of Channel 9 and the Australian Government can fall victims to attacks, Gifts Actually certainly can as well. 

Therefore we feel it is important to tell you that we do not keep any of your information on our personal or company computers. Apart from emails we send you, generally in response to your contacts, there we keep no important information from you. 

We use third party providers to operate our business. Our store is hosted by Shopify, and all you payments are processed directly with one of our payment partners:

• Shopify payments (Visa MasterCard)
• Afterpay,
• Humm,
• Latitude Pay,
• Paypal

We do not offer inhouse processing. 

This means we do not receive any of your card or account information. When you enter your card number is stays directly with the payment provider and is then passed on to us. Also if we need to refund you for any reason is will be refunded to the same payment provider, account or card that was used to make the initial purchase. This eliminates fraud as we can't have people ordering something on one card (stolen) and and ask a refund to a separate card/account etc (Theirs). And makes sure we have a solid audit trail in the very unlikely event something goes wrong. 

All our promotional emails are sent through Mailchimp. We sue Mailchimp to ensure only customers who want to be kept up to date with our products, services and promotions. This minimises spam and means our email list is safe and out of the hands of malware, hackers or other third parties. 

Store Accounts: We also do not have store accounts. Apart from being annoying  when you just want to buy an item, we think that they can pose a security risk as well. We all (Generalising) seem to have only a limited number of passwords we use as we need passwords for just about everything and many tend to use the same passwords for our banking, logins, streaming services etc. Just as we don't want to have to store and manage your banking details,  we don't want to have manage your passwords so there is no risk of data breaches and security threats from us. 

Cyber criminals are getting ,more and more clever and technology is getting more and more sophisticated to stop them. So how do you stay safe online? Here's a few tips. 

• Never give our your personal information in an email
• When you receive emails from companies or people you don't know, check the email address first. If it's cold calling from a Gmail or Hotmail account etc.; be very suspicious especially if it contains attachments. 
• If the email is from a company account, double check the email extension. I.e. ####@Australiangovermnent.tax.com.au - All our government organisations use the extension .gov.au. likewise Telstra will use @telstra.com.au or @bigpond.com etc. If you notice any changes or odd email extensions consider deleting the email and contacting the company directly. On that, you look up the number - don't use the number in the email as it may look very similar but have a number out of place. 
• Don't respond to popups from third parties - sometimes, when browsing a site you get a pop-up from what appears to be an unrelated business - be careful these could be phishing pop-ups looking for contact details to send Malware to.
• When signing up to store accounts - set us a "Shopping"  Hotmail/Gmail email separate to your own and have a "shopping password". You can auto-forward the emails from the Hotmail/Gmail account to your normal email if you wish so you can see updates. Never respond from your own email address.
• Check if the organisation has privacy policies to deal with your online information - if they don't, they are probably not legit or make money from selling your details. 

If you have any questions about how we keep your details private, please email us at hello@giftsactually.com.au . 

Take care and happy shopping.

kindest regards