Search

I am an Australian business

I want support and advice for working with and engaging government.

The Beta version of digital.gov.au incorporates new design elements, components and widgets to simplify user experience and improve digital communications. This is an open, transparent test to encourage user input.

Tell us what you think and help us make it better.

content test

dfs

ffdsfdsfsfd

Enter a keyword within the title

Content type

Content type
Select a content type to filter by
Topics

Topics
Select a topic to filter by.
Title

Title

Enter a keyword within the title

Showing 1 - 5 of 5

The digital.gov.au website is managed by the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA). In most instances, the DTA Privacy Officer will be the first point of contact for any queries, requests or issues relating to the site.

A privacy-by-design approach is built into digital.gov.au using best practice to comply with the Privacy Act. This approach embeds the latest security requirements, while providing for a fast, intuitive and inclusive user experience for all.

This summary sets out key points about how digital.gov.au handles the collection of information, including personal or sensitive information.

Note: no information will be requested or published that is classified above Official Sensitive.

When any information is collected, held, used, disclosed or stored, it is done so in accordance with the:

Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) (Privacy Act)
Australian Privacy Principles (APPs)
Privacy (Australian Government Agencies – Governance) APP Code 2017 (the Code).

More information can be found in the DTA's main privacy policy.

Collection

digital.gov.au may collect or hold personal information that is reasonably necessary for, or directly related to, the performance of its functions and activities. This may include your name, phone number, email and address and information about your interactions with the site through our services or the pages you visit.

Note: Personal information will usually be collected directly from you, unless there is an exception in the Privacy Act that permits digital.gov.au to collect personal information from a third party.

Site feedback

There is the opportunity to make enquiries or provide feedback, commentary and comments throughout the site. This drive improvements and new features. No personal or identifying information is required from you to participate.

Site interactions

Some data may be collected that includes details about your interactions with digital.gov.au, site features or the pages you visit, for example Google Analytics, the Custom Satisfaction Tool, and so on. This is collected as de-identified information, with no capacity to trace the interactions back to you.

Storage and protection

All information received by the DTA is held in secure online systems. Physical access to our offices is restricted and limited to authorised personnel only. Staff have access to personal information on a need-to-know basis only.

When personal information no longer needs to be retained as part of a Commonwealth record, it is generally destroyed in accordance with the Archives Act 1983.

Use and disclosure

Your personal information will primarily be used and disclosed for the purpose for which it was collected, unless you give your consent.

However, there may be a requirement to use or disclose your personal information for another purpose in certain circumstances.

For example, if required or permitted by law or for a purpose related to, or directly related to, the purpose of collection where you would reasonably expect that this to occur.

Sometimes your personal information will be passed to other government agencies or organisations such as the Australian Taxation Office or Department of Home Affairs, including overseas governments or organisations, for the purpose of assisting with your enquiry or application.

Access and correction

You can request access to, or correction of, your personal information by contacting digital.gov.au using the details below.

All request for access or correction will be actioned quickly, unless there is a sound reason under law to refuse.

If your personal information is not corrected, reasonable steps will be taken to associate a statement with your file upon request.

Complaints

Your privacy is taken seriously. All efforts have been made to protect your personal information.

To make a complaint about how your personal information is handled, please contact digital.gov.au using the details below.

How to contact us

Telephone: 02 6120 8595
Email: privacy@dta.gov.au
Mail: Privacy Officer
Digital Transformation Agency,
PO Box 457
Canberra City
ACT 2601

Privacy Impact Assessments

The Australian Government Agencies Privacy Code requires agencies to conduct a Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) for all high privacy risk projects. A high privacy risk project is one that involves a new or changed way of handling personal information that is likely to have a significant impact on the privacy of individuals.

Currently there are no projects associated with this site, that have required a PIA. If this should occur in the future, it will be captured on this page as part of a digital.gov.au Register of Privacy Impact Assessments.

A PIA is a systematic assessment of a project that identifies the impact that the project might have on the privacy of individuals. It sets out recommendations for managing, minimising or eliminating that impact.

PIAs assess a project’s risk of non-compliance with privacy legislation and identifies controls to mitigate the risk. A PIA is much more than a simple compliance check. It should ‘tell the full story’ of a project from a privacy perspective, going beyond compliance to consider the broader privacy implications and risks, including whether the planned use of personal information in the project will be acceptable to the community. PIAs are key to building community trust and have a range of other benefits, such as demystifying the project and its objectives.

Historical training

To get a copy of the following historical training, contact observatory@dta.gov.au:

Google Analytics Privacy and Security Refresher
Google Cloud Platform Products
Future proofing for Google Analytics 4
Setting up your GA4 Report Library
Deep Dive into GA4 Reporting & Visualisations
Google Analytics 4 Event Tracking
Migrating Looker reports to GA4
Overview of Google Tag Manager
Campaign (UTM) Tracking in GA4
Deep dive into Looker Studio
What's new in GA4
Universal analytics data export

Monthly training

Find out more about monthly training and register for an upcoming event, visit Eventbrite. 

Google training

Google offers a range of free training courses and certification programs from beginner to advanced levels.  
 
Visit Google Marketing Platform Academy, Skill Shop and Google Cloud Courses to find out more. 

Managing Data Deletion Requests

Why would you need to delete data?

GA & your responsibilities

Managing accounts, properties, user access and data. It is a requirement under the Observatory Terms of Service to regularly review accounts and properties.
Ensuring that information captured in Google Analytics is not personally identifiable and that all employees and contractors comply with the Australian Privacy Principles and obligations under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth).
Following the Observatory Terms of Service, Google Analytics Terms of Service and Google Cloud Platform Terms of Service information relating to privacy.
Undertaking an independent privacy threshold / impact assessment.
Compliance with the Information Security Manual (ISM), which includes not storing personal or sensitive information on Google Analytics or Google Cloud Platform Services, and protecting information from cyber threats.
Google is constantly changing and while we do our best to keep you informed, it is your responsibility to monitor for product, privacy and security updates which may impact your privacy and security assessments and agency risk tolerance.

What is PII and where it can show up in GA4

PII is any information that could be used on its own to directly identify, contact, or precisely locate an individual. This includes:

Email addresses
Mailing addresses
Phone numbers
Precise locations (such as GPS coordinates)
Full names or usernames

PII may also include other types of information that are considered personal or sensitive under the Australian Privacy Act, such as:

A person’s name, signature, home address, email address, telephone number, personal IP address, date of birth
Health information, bank account details, credit information and employment details
Sensitive information’ (includes information or opinion about an individual’s racial or ethnic origin, political opinion, religious beliefs, sexual orientation or criminal record, provided the information or opinion otherwise meets the definition of personal information)

Why you should care:

You are obligated to comply with the Privacy Act, as previously discussed, and to protect user privacy
Google policies mandate that no data be passed to Google that Google could use or recognise as PII
Continued collection of PII data in a GA4 property can result in suspension and/or permanent deletion of that property by Google
As such, it’s crucial you regularly check your property for PII and delete any data that may contain it

In GA4, PII may occur in:

Page URLs and titles
Campaign (UTM) dimensions (e.g. Source, Medium, Keyword, Campaign, Content, Term)
Site search dimensions
Event dimensions (e.g. Event Name and Event Parameters)
Any other fields where users can input information, and this is sent to GA4
Custom dimensions, if using
User IDs, if using
Data imports, if using

As GA4 records all URLs visited by users, it will also record URLs that potentially have PII in them. This can happen on forms, or any sections of a website where the user is required to provide information. If the user submits PII such as their email address, name, etc. as part of a form submission, site search, and so on, that data may be sent to GA4 (within a page URL, an event or custom dimension, and so on). While on-site design features and GA configurations can be used to limit such vulnerabilities, individual agency Privacy Notices should clearly outline the type of data that could be collected, and also call out any potential inadvertent mechanisms for data collection.

How to access the data deletion feature and what are the prerequisites?

To access the data deletion feature in GA4, you need to have Editor or Admin access to the property. You can check your access level by going to Admin > Data Deletion Requests. If the option is greyed out, you do not have the required access level.

If you have the required access level, you can click on Data Deletion Requests and then click on Schedule Data Deletion Request to start the process.

How to make a data deletion request step-by-step

There are four steps to make a data deletion request in GA4:

Select the deletion type
Select the deletion range
Select the deletion filter
Confirm the data deletion request

Let’s go through each step in detail.

Step 1: Select the deletion type

This is where you need to specify what type of data you want to delete from your GA4 property. There are four options to choose from:

Delete all parameters on all events
Delete all registered parameters on selected events
Delete all selected parameters on all events
Delete selected registered parameters on selected events
Delete selected user properties

To understand these options, you need to have a basic understanding of the GA4 data structure, which consists of events and event parameters, and users and user properties.

Events and event parameters

Events are any user action on your site/app that is tracked in GA4. These can include page views, link clicks, downloads, video plays, or form submissions, and more. Event parameters are additional information that is associated with each event, such as the page title, page URL, link URL, engagement time, etc. For example, a page_view event fires each time a page is viewed on your site, and it may have parameters such as page_location, page_referrer, and page_title.

Users and user properties

Users are individual people who visit your site/app and are tracked in GA4. User properties are attributes that describe each user, such as their country, browser, language, device category, etc. For example, a user may have a user property of country with a value of Australia. User properties can also be customised to capture specific information about your users, such as their preferences, interests, or behaviours.

Deletion type options

Depending on what type of data you want to delete, you can choose one of the following options:

Delete all parameters on all events: This option will remove all the event parameters from all the events in your GA4 property. This means you will lose all the context and details about the events that happened on your site/app. You will only know how many events of each type occurred, but not any other information about them. This option is not recommended unless you want to delete all your data.
Delete all registered parameters on selected events: This option will remove all the event parameters from the events that you select in your GA4 property. This means you will lose all the context and details about the selected events that happened on your site/app. You will only know how many events of the selected types occurred, but not any other information about them. This option may be useful if you want to delete data from specific events that are not relevant or useful for your analysis.
Delete all selected parameters on all events: This option will remove the event parameters that you select from all the events in your GA4 property. This means you will lose some of the context and details about all the events that happened on your site/app. You will still know how many events of each type occurred, and some information about them, but not the information that is contained in the selected parameters. This option is recommended if you want to delete data that may contain PII or other unwanted data, such as page URLs, link URLs, site search terms, etc.
Delete selected registered parameters on selected events: This option will remove the event parameters that you select from the events that you select in your GA4 property. This means you will lose some of the context and details about the selected events that happened on your site/app. You will still know how many events of the selected types occurred, and some information about them, but not the information that is contained in the selected parameters. This option may be useful if you want to delete data that is specific to certain events, such as custom dimensions, custom parameters, etc.
Delete selected user properties: This option will remove the user properties that you select from all the users in your GA4 property. This means you will lose some of the attributes that describe your users, such as their country, browser, language, device category, etc. You will still know how many users visited your site/app, and some information about them, but not the information that is contained in the selected user properties. This option may be useful if you want to delete data that may contain PII or other unwanted data, such as user IDs, custom user properties, etc.

Off

This is where you need to specify what type of data you want to delete from your GA4 property. There are four options to choose from:
- Delete all parameters on all events
- Delete all registered parameters on selected events
- Delete all selected parameters on all events
- Delete selected registered parameters on selected events
- Delete selected user properties
To understand these options, you need to have a basic understanding of the GA4 data structure, which consists of events and event parameters, and users and user properties.
Events and event parameters
Events are any user action on your site/app that is tracked in GA4. These can include page views, link clicks, downloads, video plays, or form submissions, and more. Event parameters are additional information that is associated with each event, such as the page title, page URL, link URL, engagement time, etc. For example, a page_view event fires each time a page is viewed on your site, and it may have parameters such as page_location, page_referrer, and page_title.
Users and user properties
Users are individual people who visit your site/app and are tracked in GA4. User properties are attributes that describe each user, such as their country, browser, language, device category, etc. For example, a user may have a user property of country with a value of Australia. User properties can also be customised to capture specific information about your users, such as their preferences, interests, or behaviours.
Deletion type options
Depending on what type of data you want to delete, you can choose one of the following options:
- Delete all parameters on all events: This option will remove all the event parameters from all the events in your GA4 property. This means you will lose all the context and details about the events that happened on your site/app. You will only know how many events of each type occurred, but not any other information about them. This option is not recommended unless you want to delete all your data.
- Delete all registered parameters on selected events: This option will remove all the event parameters from the events that you select in your GA4 property. This means you will lose all the context and details about the selected events that happened on your site/app. You will only know how many events of the selected types occurred, but not any other information about them. This option may be useful if you want to delete data from specific events that are not relevant or useful for your analysis.
- Delete all selected parameters on all events: This option will remove the event parameters that you select from all the events in your GA4 property. This means you will lose some of the context and details about all the events that happened on your site/app. You will still know how many events of each type occurred, and some information about them, but not the information that is contained in the selected parameters. This option is recommended if you want to delete data that may contain PII or other unwanted data, such as page URLs, link URLs, site search terms, etc.
- Delete selected registered parameters on selected events: This option will remove the event parameters that you select from the events that you select in your GA4 property. This means you will lose some of the context and details about the selected events that happened on your site/app. You will still know how many events of the selected types occurred, and some information about them, but not the information that is contained in the selected parameters. This option may be useful if you want to delete data that is specific to certain events, such as custom dimensions, custom parameters, etc.
- Delete selected user properties: This option will remove the user properties that you select from all the users in your GA4 property. This means you will lose some of the attributes that describe your users, such as their country, browser, language, device category, etc. You will still know how many users visited your site/app, and some information about them, but not the information that is contained in the selected user properties. This option may be useful if you want to delete data that may contain PII or other unwanted data, such as user IDs, custom user properties, etc.

Step 2: Select the deletion range

This is where you need to specify the time range for the data deletion request. You can choose a start date and an end date for the deletion, or select all time to delete all the data in your GA4 property. The time range must be within the data retention period of your GA4 property, which is usually 14 months by default. You can check your data retention settings by going to Admin > Data Settings > Data Retention.

Off

This is where you need to specify the time range for the data deletion request. You can choose a start date and an end date for the deletion, or select all time to delete all the data in your GA4 property. The time range must be within the data retention period of your GA4 property, which is usually 14 months by default. You can check your data retention settings by going to Admin > Data Settings > Data Retention.

Step 3: Select the deletion filter

This is where you need to specify the filter for the data deletion request. You can choose to delete data from all streams in your GA4 property, or select specific streams to delete data from. Streams are the sources of data that are sent to your GA4 property, such as your website, app, or Firebase project. You can check your streams by going to Admin > Data Streams.

If you choose to delete data from specific streams, you can also apply additional filters to narrow down the data deletion request. You can filter by:

Event name: The name of the event that you want to delete data from, such as page_view, click, scroll, etc.
Event parameter name: The name of the event parameter that you want to delete data from, such as page_location, link_url, engagement_time_msec, etc.
Event parameter value: The value of the event parameter that you want to delete data from, such as [URL], mailto:info@example.com, 3000, etc.
User property name: The name of the user property that you want to delete data from, such as country, browser, language, device_category, etc.
User property value: The value of the user property that you want to delete data from, such as Australia, Chrome, English, desktop, etc.

You can use the filter operators to match the exact value, or use the contains, starts with, or ends with operators to match partial values. You can also use the and/or operators to combine multiple filters.

Off

This is where you need to specify the filter for the data deletion request. You can choose to delete data from all streams in your GA4 property, or select specific streams to delete data from. Streams are the sources of data that are sent to your GA4 property, such as your website, app, or Firebase project. You can check your streams by going to Admin > Data Streams.
If you choose to delete data from specific streams, you can also apply additional filters to narrow down the data deletion request. You can filter by:
- Event name: The name of the event that you want to delete data from, such as page_view, click, scroll, etc.
- Event parameter name: The name of the event parameter that you want to delete data from, such as page_location, link_url, engagement_time_msec, etc.
- Event parameter value: The value of the event parameter that you want to delete data from, such as [URL], mailto:info@example.com, 3000, etc.
- User property name: The name of the user property that you want to delete data from, such as country, browser, language, device_category, etc.
- User property value: The value of the user property that you want to delete data from, such as Australia, Chrome, English, desktop, etc.
You can use the filter operators to match the exact value, or use the contains, starts with, or ends with operators to match partial values. You can also use the and/or operators to combine multiple filters.

Step 4: Confirm the data deletion request

Once you have selected the deletion type, range, and filter, you can click on Schedule Request to confirm the data deletion request. You will see a confirmation message that shows the details of your request and warns you that the data deletion is irreversible. You will also see a note that you have one week to review and cancel the data deletion request before it is permanent. Click on Confirm Data Deletion to proceed.

Off

Once you have selected the deletion type, range, and filter, you can click on Schedule Request to confirm the data deletion request. You will see a confirmation message that shows the details of your request and warns you that the data deletion is irreversible. You will also see a note that you have one week to review and cancel the data deletion request before it is permanent. Click on Confirm Data Deletion to proceed.

How to preview and cancel data deletion requests

After you have confirmed the data deletion request, you can go back to the Data Deletion Requests page and see the status of your request. You will see a list of all the data deletion requests that you have made, and their status, such as:

Preview active: This means that the data deletion request is in the seven-day grace period, and you can preview the effect of the request on your reports before it is permanent. You can also cancel the request during this period.
Deletion in progress: This means that the data deletion request is being processed and the data is being removed from your GA4 property. You cannot cancel the request during this period.
Deletion completed: This means that the data deletion request has been completed and the data has been removed from your GA4 property. You cannot undo the request after this period.

To preview the effect of a data deletion request, you can click on the Preview Active status and then click on Preview Request. You will be taken to the Analysis Hub, where you can see how the data deletion request will affect your reports. You can compare the data before and after the deletion, and check if the data that you want to delete is removed as intended. You can also use the Analysis Hub to create custom reports and analyses to preview the data deletion request.

To cancel a data deletion request, you can click on the Preview Active status and then click on Cancel Request. You will see a confirmation message that asks you to confirm the cancellation. Click on Confirm Cancellation to proceed. You will see a message that says that the data deletion request has been cancelled and the data will not be deleted from your GA4 property.

Best practice tips for data deletion and data quality

Data deletion is a useful feature to remove unwanted data from your GA4 property, but it should not be the only way to ensure data quality and privacy. Here are some best practice tips to help you manage your data in GA4:

Regularly check your GA4 property for PII or other unwanted data, and delete it as soon as possible. You can use the Analysis Hub to create custom reports and analyses to identify PII or other unwanted data in your GA4 property.
Sanitise the tracking of forms and other data points on your website to ensure that any personal information submitted is either redacted or substituted before it is sent to GA4. You can use Google Tag Manager or other methods to modify the data before sending it to GA4.
Review your GA4 configuration and implementation to ensure that you are not collecting or sending any PII or other unwanted data to GA4. You can use the Debug View or the Tag Assistant to check the data that is being sent to GA4.
Review your GA4 account and property settings to ensure that you are following the best practices for data retention, data sharing, user access, and user consent. You can use the Admin section to check and update your settings.
Review your agency Privacy Notice and Terms of Service to ensure that they are clear and transparent about the type of data that you collect and use, and the potential mechanisms for data collection. You can also provide users with options to opt out of data collection or request data deletion.

This is a beta website. Tell us what you think.

Criterion 4

Criterion 5

About the Digital Access Standard