SPTO Privacy Statement

Because we gather information about the visitors to the South Pacific Tourism Organisation's (SPTO) web site, we feel you should fully understand the terms and conditions surrounding the capture and use of that information.

SPTO gathers two types of information about users:

• Data that users provide through optional, voluntary registration on our site, and
• Aggregated tracking information derived mainly by totalling page views throughout our sites.

Such information enables us to better tailor our content to readers' needs and help our members better understand the demographics of our audience.
SPTO does not provide any of our visitor registration information to any other third parties under any circumstances.

SPTO offers free electronic newsletters to users. SPTO gathers the e-mail addresses of users who voluntarily subscribe. Subscribers may remove themselves from any mailing list by following the instructions contained in every newsletter.

SPTO tracks user traffic patterns throughout the SPTO website and this information is correlated with data about individual users. Overall usage statistics, according to a user's domain name, browser type and MIME type are determined by reading this information from the browser string (information which is contained in every user's browser). SPTO also tracks and catalogues the search terms that customers enter into our search tools, but this tracking is never associated with individual users.

A cookie is a small data file that certain Web sites write to your hard drive when you visit them. A cookie file can contain information such as a user ID that the site uses to track the pages you have visited. But the only personal information a cookie can contain is information you supply yourself. A cookie cannot read data off your hard disk or read cookie files created by other sites. SPTO uses cookies to track user activity on our web site.

SPTO uses information that users voluntarily provide in order to send out electronic newsletters and other occasional notifications / marketing messages. We send out newsletters to subscribers on a regular schedule and occasionally send out special editions when we think subscribers might be particularly interested in something we are doing. SPTO never shares newsletter mailing lists with any third parties, including members or partners.
We use tracking information to determine which areas of our sites users like and do not like based on traffic to those areas. SPTO does not track what individual users read, but rather how well each page performs overall. This helps us continue to build a better service for our users.
We track search terms entered in our search function as one of many measures of what interests our users. But we do not track which terms a particular user enters.
SPTO creates aggregrate reports on user demographics and traffic patterns for members and partners. This allows our members to understand how well our site is performing in terms of promoting their products, services and destinations. SPTO never shares individual personal information with anyone, so an member will never know that a specific user clicked their advertisement.
SPTO uses the above information to tailor our content to suit your needs and help our members better understand our audience demographics. We do not share information about individual users with any third party.

SPTO gives users options wherever necessary and practical, such choices include:

• Opting which content to receive in a newsletter
• Opting whether to receive information in addition to the newsletter to which a user is subscribing.

Users may unsubscribe to any of our electronic newsletters at any time by following the instructions contained at the end of each newsletter.

back to top