Elite Truck and Car School Pty Ltd (“ETACS”, “we”, “us”, “our”) is a Registered Training Organisation delivering nationally recognised driver training, driver assessment and heavy vehicle driver verification services in Queensland and northern New South Wales.
We are bound by the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the thirteen Australian Privacy Principles (APPs). This Policy explains how we collect, hold, use, disclose, secure and dispose of your personal information.
This Policy applies to everything we do, including:
By using our website, submitting an enquiry, completing an online test, registering as a student or enrolling in a course, you acknowledge that you have read and understood this Policy.
This Policy should be read together with our Terms of Service, our Website Disclaimer, and the Privacy Notice in our Participant Handbook. Where those documents deal with a matter in more detail, they apply as well. In relation to our website and online services, this Policy prevails.
As an RTO and a driver training provider, some of our collection and disclosure is required by law rather than by your consent. The main obligations are:
National Vocational Education and Training Regulator Act 2011 (Cth) — we must report Total VET Activity data to the National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER) and to state and territory training authorities.
2025 Standards for Registered Training Organisations (in effect from 1 July 2025) — we must create and keep accurate records of your training, assessment, support and certification, and make them available to our regulator.
Student Identifiers Act 2014 (Cth) — we must collect and verify your Unique Student Identifier (USI) before we can issue AQF certification.
Transport Operations (Road Use Management) Act 1995 (Qld) and its subordinate legislation — we disclose licensing and assessment outcomes to the Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads (TMR). Equivalent arrangements apply with Transport for NSW for our New South Wales operations.
Heavy Vehicle National Law — we may collect and retain records about your fitness to drive, medical status and driving history.
Spam Act 2003 (Cth) and Do Not Call Register Act 2006 (Cth) — these govern how we may send you marketing emails and SMS, and how we may telephone you.
Australian Consumer Law — governs our dealings with you as a consumer, including refunds and the representations we make.
Where a disclosure is required or authorised by an Australian law, or by a court or tribunal order, we will make it whether or not you have consented.
Personal information means information or an opinion about you where you are identified, or reasonably identifiable — whether or not it is true, and whether or not it is written down.
Sensitive information is a category of personal information that attracts extra protection under the Privacy Act. It includes health information, and information about racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union or professional association membership, sexual orientation, criminal record and biometric information.
We do collect sensitive information about you. Section 5 explains what, and why.
You have the option of dealing with us anonymously or under a pseudonym where it is lawful and practicable.
You can browse our website, take our free practice road rules tests without submitting your results, and make a general phone enquiry without identifying yourself.
You cannot enrol in a course, sit a nationally recognised assessment, receive a Statement of Attainment or Qualification, or have a licensing outcome recorded with TMR anonymously. Identity verification is a legal requirement for those activities.
We only collect what is reasonably necessary for our functions and activities. Not every category below applies to every person.
Full name and preferred name, date of birth, gender, residential and postal address, email address, home, work and mobile phone numbers, emergency contact details, and your employer or the organisation booking training on your behalf.
Driver licence number, class, expiry and conditions. The date your current licence class was issued, so we can verify the twelve-month holding period required for units such as TLIC4006. Licence history and status, learner logbook records, and driving offences or suspensions where they affect your eligibility. The outcomes of practical driving assessments and heavy vehicle driver verification.
To meet our reporting obligations, we must collect a standard national data set. This includes your Unique Student Identifier (USI), country of birth, main language spoken at home, English proficiency, Indigenous status, disability status and disability type, highest completed school level, previous qualifications, employment status and study reason.
Please note that Indigenous status, disability status and disability type are sensitive information. We collect them because Commonwealth law requires us to report them. By completing your enrolment form you consent to their collection for that purpose. Where a field is optional, you may decline to answer it.
Health information relevant to your fitness to drive, including commercial vehicle driver medical certificates. Information about medical conditions, medications or injuries that may affect your ability to train or be assessed safely. Information needed to make reasonable adjustments to assessment for disability, illness or special consideration. We may also record health information arising from an incident, injury or first aid event during training.
Citizenship, residency or visa status, where this affects course eligibility, funding eligibility or licensing.
Your enrolment form and Student Agreement. LLND assessment questions, your responses, and the ratings and reports generated from them. Practice test and self-study test attempts, answers, scores, timing and progress. Assessment submissions and cover sheets, assessor observations and judgements, and competency outcomes. Credit transfer and RPL applications and supporting evidence. Individual support plans, attendance records, and any incident, misconduct or plagiarism records. Complaints, appeals and their outcomes. The AQF certification we issue to you.
Invoices, fees paid and outstanding, payment method and dates, refund applications and supporting evidence, and the bank account you nominate for a refund.
We do not store full credit or debit card numbers. Card payments are processed by our payment provider or terminal, and we receive only a transaction confirmation and a truncated card reference.
The content of enquiry forms, emails, SMS, WhatsApp messages, and social media messages and comments. Notes of phone conversations. NCVER Quality Indicator survey responses. Reviews, testimonials and photographs you provide or consent to us publishing.
Your IP address and the approximate location derived from it. Browser type and version, device type, operating system and screen size. The referring website and the search terms that brought you to us. Pages viewed, time on page and scroll depth. The date and time of your visit. Form interactions and submissions, clicks on buttons, phone links and WhatsApp links, file and PDF downloads, and video engagement.
If you have a Training Portal account, we also record your username, an encrypted version of your password, login and logout times, the IP address used at login, password reset requests, and your activity in the portal.
Our practice tests and self-study tests save your in-progress answers in your browser’s local storage so you do not lose your place if the page reloads. That data stays on your device until you clear it or complete the test, and is only sent to us if you choose to submit your results.
Cookie and pixel identifiers, advertising IDs, ad click identifiers, and conversion events. Where we use customer list matching, a hashed — that is, irreversibly scrambled — version of your email address or mobile number.
Where our training vehicles are fitted with dash cameras, in-cab cameras, telematics or GPS units, we may collect footage, location, speed and vehicle operation data during training and assessment. We use this for safety, incident investigation, assessment evidence and insurance. Where CCTV operates at our premises, signage is displayed at the entrance.
We will not use or disclose your personal information for an unrelated purpose unless you consent, or the use or disclosure is required or authorised by law.
We do not sell your personal information.
Directly from you — when you complete an enquiry form, registration form, enrolment form, practice test submission, LLND assessment or survey; when you call, email, text or message us; when you visit our office; and during training and assessment.
Automatically — through cookies, pixels, tags and server logs when you use our website. See section 9.
From third parties — from the USI Registrar; from TMR and other road transport authorities; from your employer, a labour hire company, an insurer or a government agency where they arrange or fund your training; from another RTO when we verify a Statement of Attainment for credit transfer, with your written consent; from medical practitioners where you provide or authorise a medical certificate; from referral partners; and from public sources such as your public social media profile when you interact with our pages.
From partner training organisations — where you access a practice test, self-study assessment or LLND assessment that we host on behalf of, or in partnership with, another training organisation, we may receive your name, contact details, licence number and the identity of the referring organisation, so your result reaches the right place.
If we receive information about you that we did not ask for and could not lawfully have collected, we will destroy or de-identify it as soon as practicable, unless we are required by law to keep it.
We use software, including artificial intelligence tools, to assist with parts of our assessment and administration. You should know the following.
LLND assessment. Your written responses to our Language, Literacy, Numeracy and Digital literacy assessment may be processed by an automated system that generates an indicative rating and a written report against the Australian Core Skills Framework. That output informs a decision about whether you can be enrolled and what support you need.
Practice and self-study tests. Answers are marked automatically against a stored answer key, and feedback is generated automatically.
Human oversight. An automated output is never the final decision. A qualified trainer or assessor reviews automated LLND outputs and makes the enrolment and support decisions. Nationally recognised competency judgements are always made by a qualified assessor, never by software alone.
Your rights. If an automated process has contributed to a decision affecting you, you may ask us to explain how that decision was reached, ask for it to be reviewed by a person, and lodge an appeal under the Complaints and Appeals process in our Participant Handbook.
Processing arrangements. Where an external AI service provider processes your responses, it does so under contract, for the sole purpose of returning the assessment output to us. Our current provider processes this data in Australia. See section 12 for more on where our providers store information.
A cookie is a small text file placed on your device by a website. A pixel or tag is a small piece of code that loads with a page and lets us or a third party record an event. Local storage is a browser feature that lets a website save data on your device. We use all three.
Cookies are either first-party (set by etacs.com.au) or third-party (set by another domain such as an analytics or advertising provider). They are either session cookies, deleted when you close your browser, or persistent cookies, which stay for a set period.
These are required for the website to work and cannot be switched off. They maintain your session and page state, keep you logged in to the Training Portal, protect our forms against spam and cross-site request forgery, remember your cookie preferences, and support security, bot filtering and rate limiting. They are set by WordPress, by our forms plugin, and by our hosting provider and firewall.
Blocking these will break the Training Portal and our enquiry and assessment forms.
These remember your choices and improve your experience. They save your progress and answers in practice and self-study tests using browser local storage, remember that you have dismissed a notice or completed a step, and support embedded content such as Google Maps, Google Drive and Docs previews, and video players.
We use Google Analytics 4 to understand how our site is used. Its cookies distinguish visitors and sessions and record pages viewed, traffic sources, events and conversions.
Google Ads cookies attribute conversions to our ads and build remarketing audiences. Meta (Facebook and Instagram) cookies record that you visited our site after seeing an ad, measure conversions, and build Custom and Lookalike Audiences. TikTok cookies measure campaign performance and deliver ads to users who have shown interest in driver training.
Cookie names and providers change over time. We review this section whenever we change our website.
You can control cookies and tracking in several ways.
Opting out stops personalised advertising. It does not stop you seeing ads, and it does not affect information we already hold.
Some browsers can send a Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal. There is no consistent industry standard for responding to these, and our website does not currently respond to them. You can still control tracking using the methods above.
We use Google Analytics 4 to understand how visitors find and use our site — which pages they read, which courses attract interest, where visitors come from, and which enquiry forms are completed. Google processes this data on our behalf under its data processing terms and may transfer it outside Australia.
We advertise through Google Search, Display and YouTube. If you visit our site, you may later see our ads on other websites and apps in Google’s network. This uses cookies and advertising identifiers. We may also upload hashed customer lists to Google Ads to reach existing contacts, or to exclude them from campaigns.
We use the Meta Pixel, and may use the Meta Conversions API. These record actions you take on our site after clicking one of our ads — submitting an enquiry form, for example, or completing a practice test — so we can measure how our campaigns perform and reach people with similar interests.
Where we use the Conversions API, information about your interaction is sent from our server to Meta. Where we upload a customer list to build a Custom Audience, your email address or mobile number is hashed before it is sent, meaning Meta receives a scrambled value it uses only to match against existing accounts. Meta may link this data to your Facebook or Instagram account.
We use the TikTok Pixel to measure campaign performance and to deliver ads to people who have shown interest in driver training.
Our pages embed Google Maps, Google Drive and Docs previews of our forms and handbooks, a Google review link, and links to our social media. When these load, the provider may set cookies and receive your IP address and the page URL. These providers act independently of us, and their own privacy policies apply.
We record how you found us — including the “How did you hear about us?” field on our registration form, the campaign parameters in the link you clicked, and the referring website. We use this to understand which channels work and where to direct our advertising.
NCVER. Your enrolment and activity data, as required by law. NCVER may use and disclose it for VET administration, statistics, research, surveys, data linkage and to populate your authenticated VET transcript, and may disclose it to the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations, Commonwealth and state authorities, and VET regulators. See ncver.edu.au/privacy
Department of Employment and Workplace Relations. As authorised by the Privacy Act and the NVETR Act. See dewr.gov.au/national-vet-data/vet-privacy-notice
Student Identifiers Registrar. Your identity details, to create or verify your USI. See usi.gov.au/documents/privacy-notice
Australian Skills Quality Authority. Your contact details on request, and access to your student file for audit, complaint or investigation purposes.
Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads, and Transport for NSW where applicable. Identity, licence and assessment outcome data for licensing purposes.
State and territory training authorities. As authorised by law.
Your employer or funding body. Where they arrange or fund your training: attendance, progress, competency outcomes and invoicing information.
Service providers. Website hosting, email and SMS delivery, cloud storage and document services, student management and CRM systems, payment processing, accounting, AI-assisted assessment tools, analytics and advertising platforms, and IT and web development contractors.
Professional advisers. Lawyers, accountants, auditors and insurers, where reasonably required.
Debt collection agencies. Where fees are more than 45 days overdue and no payment arrangement is in place, as set out in our Fees and Charges Policy.
Emergency services and medical practitioners. Where necessary to lessen or prevent a serious threat to life, health or safety.
Law enforcement, courts and regulators. Where required or authorised by law.
We require our service providers to handle your information consistently with this Policy and the Privacy Act, and to use it only for the purpose we engaged them for.
Some of the service providers we use store or process data outside Australia. Before disclosing personal information to an overseas recipient, we take reasonable steps to ensure the recipient does not breach the Australian Privacy Principles, usually through contractual data protection terms.
Our providers are likely to store or process information in the following locations:
We do not send your national VET data, USI, licensing data or student file overseas, except where a cloud backup service we use stores it, and only under contractual protections.
We take reasonable steps to protect personal information from misuse, interference, loss, and unauthorised access, modification or disclosure. Our measures include:
No method of transmission or storage is completely secure. You are responsible for keeping your Training Portal password confidential, and for telling us promptly if you think your account has been compromised.
Data breaches. We maintain a data breach response plan. If a breach occurs that is likely to result in serious harm to you, we will notify you and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, as required by the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme.
Records of AQF certification issued — qualifications, statements of attainment and unit outcomes — are kept for 30 years, then transferred to the regulator as required.
Student files, enrolment records, assessment evidence and LLND records are kept for at least seven years from completion or withdrawal, as required by the 2025 Standards for RTOs and our records management policy.
Financial records, invoices, receipts and refund assessments are kept for seven years to meet taxation requirements.
Complaints, appeals and incident records are kept for seven years from resolution.
Enquiries that do not lead to enrolment are kept for 24 months from your last contact with us.
Marketing contact lists are kept until you unsubscribe. We then keep a suppression record so that we do not contact you again.
Website analytics data is kept according to our Google Analytics retention setting, and advertising data according to each platform’s own retention policy.
Dash camera, in-vehicle and CCTV footage, where recorded, is kept for [FOOTAGE RETENTION PERIOD] unless it is required for an incident, claim or investigation.
When information is no longer needed for any purpose for which it may lawfully be used, and we are not required to keep it, we destroy it securely or de-identify it.
You may ask for access to the personal information we hold about you, and ask us to correct it if it is inaccurate, out of date, incomplete, irrelevant or misleading.
How to ask. Contact our Privacy Officer using the details in section 17, describing the information you are seeking. We will ask you to verify your identity before we release anything.
Timeframe and cost. We will respond within 30 days. There is no charge for making a request. We may charge a reasonable, cost-based fee for retrieving and copying archived records, and we will tell you the amount before we proceed. Current students can also arrange with their trainer to view their training records in person at no cost.
If we refuse. In limited circumstances we may refuse access — for example, where giving access would unreasonably affect another person’s privacy, where the information relates to anticipated legal proceedings, or where the law requires us to withhold it. If we refuse, we will tell you in writing why, and how to complain.
Assessment outcomes. A request to change an assessment result is handled through the Complaints and Appeals process in our Participant Handbook, not through this Policy. Correcting a factual error in your record, such as a misspelt name or wrong date of birth, is handled as a correction request.
Third parties. We will not give anyone else access to your file — including an employer or family member — without your written consent, unless the law requires it.
If you believe we have breached the Australian Privacy Principles or mishandled your personal information, please tell us so we can put it right.
Step one — contact us. Write to our Privacy Officer describing what happened and what outcome you are seeking. We will acknowledge your complaint within three business days, begin investigating within seven business days, and give you a written outcome within 30 calendar days. If it will take longer, we will tell you why and keep you updated. Making a complaint is free and will not disadvantage you.
Step two — escalate. If you are not satisfied with our response, you can contact the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.
Phone: 1300 363 992 Website: oaic.gov.au Post: GPO Box 5218, Sydney NSW 2001
Complaints about our training and assessment, rather than about privacy, follow a different path — the National Training Complaints Hotline on 13 38 73, ASQA, the Queensland Office of Fair Trading on 13 74 68, the Queensland Ombudsman, or the ACCC. See the Complaints and Appeals section of our Participant Handbook.
Privacy Officer Elite Truck and Car School Pty Ltd RTO Code 45471 | ABN 75 622 311 746
Address: 3/40 Loganlea Road, Waterford West QLD 4133 Phone: 0432 453 553 (Ricky) or 0499 180 399 (Dalbir) Email: Use the contact form at etacs.com.au/contacts Website: etacs.com.au Office hours: Monday to Saturday, 8:00 am to 5:00 pm
Participants in nationally recognised training with us must be at least 18 years of age. Learner car driving students may be under 18.
Where we deal with someone under 18, we will collect their personal information with the involvement of a parent or guardian where it is reasonable and practicable to do so, and we will assess whether the young person has capacity to consent case by case. We do not knowingly direct heavy vehicle course advertising at people under 18.
Our site links to and embeds content from third-party sites, including qld.gov.au, usi.gov.au, training.gov.au, Google Drive and Docs, Google Maps and social media platforms. We are not responsible for the privacy practices of those sites, and we encourage you to read their privacy policies before giving them your information.
We review this Policy at least once a year, and whenever we materially change our systems, our website or our data practices. The current version is always available at etacs.com.au/privacy-policy and the “Last updated” date at the top shows when it last changed.
If we make a change that materially affects how we handle information we already hold about you, we will take reasonable steps to notify you, such as by email or a notice on our website. Continuing to use our website and services after a change takes effect indicates your acceptance of the updated Policy.
This Policy is provided for information and is not legal advice. We encourage participants to seek their own advice about their rights under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth).
