Your privacy

Our commitment to your privacy
We respect your right to privacy and your right to view and update your personal information which we hold about you. We are committed to protecting your privacy when you visit our sites or contact us in any way.

We will only deal with your personal information in accordance with the Privacy Act 1993 and this privacy policy.

Your personal information

Collecting your personal information for member services
Most of our services can only be accessed by becoming a member. If you access any of our member services, you will need to provide us with certain personal information, including:

• Your name.
• Your email address.

If you sign up to become a paying Consumer member, you will also need to provide us with:

• Your credit card number, type (for example, Visa), name on your card, expiry date and cvc code.
• Your residential or postal address.
• Your contact telephone number(s).

Collectively, this is known as "your personal information".

Note: Full credit card details are not handled or stored by us. They are captured directly by a PCI DSS compliant payment provider who will only deal with your personal information in accordance with the Privacy Act and this privacy policy.

Using your personal information
We collect and use your personal information to:

• Supply what you want or give you the access you need: for example, if you want to become a member of Consumer NZ and receive our email newsletters.
• Administer your membership efficiently.
• Conduct market research surveys: if you are opted-in to receiving Consumer NZ surveys – such as our satisfaction survey of energy providers – we will contact you via email to invite you to participate.
  
• Tell you about our new products and services: for example, we may email you to let you know about new content on the site you may be interested in.

Changing your personal information
You have the right to view and change any personal information we hold about you at any time.

Consumer NZ members can do this via consumer.org.nz by entering your email address and password and updating your My Consumer profile. Alternatively, you may contact Customer Services on 0800 266 786 or at onlineservice@consumer.org.nz.

Comments and community contributions
When you submit a comment, your username is displayed with your comment. You can set up or change your username in your My Consumer profile at any time.

We do not publicly display any other personal information in our community areas. We strongly advise that you do not post your email address, home address, phone number or other personal information as part of your community contributions.

Sometimes, we might want to use the messages you post on consumer.org.nz in our articles or marketing material. If so, we will endeavour to get your permission before copying or quoting your message.

Disclosing your personal information
We will not sell or rent your personal information to any third party. But we will share your contact information with trusted third parties that work on our behalf to distribute our email or print communications.

These companies will only use your personal information in accordance with the Privacy Act (or equivalent overseas legislation) and this privacy policy and will never share or on-sell any information that they hold on behalf of Consumer NZ.

Cookies

Consumer NZ uses cookies and web beacons to help us understand how visitors engage with our website. These technologies allow us to:

• Improve our sites (for example, identify and promote popular reports).
• Provide you with more targeted information (for example, personalised emails based on what you’ve viewed on our website).

Temporary cookies: We use temporary (per-session) cookies to "remember" that a member has logged in. This means that you do not have to enter your email address and password more than once during a visit.

Please note: Our temporary cookies must be accepted in order to login and gain access to the member services on the sites, or to purchase a membership from us.

If your browser is set to notify you when you receive a cookie, you will be prompted to accept the cookie (Yes/No). Please select "Yes".

Our temporary cookies will disappear when you logout of your member account.

Important! You should not use a “remember my login” feature via a browser unless you are the only person who has access to the browser. Never enable this feature on a public access computer as this could allow other people to access your personal information.

Third party cookies and other technologies: we use third party cookies and other technologies for marketing purposes and to gather website analytics. This includes:

• Remarketing: we use third party cookies – such as Google Analytics cookies – to keep track of the reports you’re interested in and remarket them to you when you leave our site (as a result, you may see ads from Consumer NZ when you visit other websites).
• Impression reporting: we use web beacons to estimate the number of users that have viewed and clicked on our advertisements (as a result, we’re able to gauge the success of a campaign).
• Demographics and interest reporting: we use cookies and web beacons to get an overview of our readership broken down by age, gender and interests such as home appliances or technology (as a result, we can provide you with relevant information, services and features and also gauge the popularity of our content).

You can opt out of Google Analytics without affecting how you visit our site. For more information on opting out of being tracked by Google Analytics please visit this page.

You can also ask your browser to delete or block third party cookies: simply search online for “cookies” + the name of your internet browser (for example, “Google Chrome”) for step-by-step instructions.

Contacting you

If you are a member, we may contact you to:

• Clarify details about your membership.
• Advise you of changes to our services or new products or promotions.
• Respond to any enquiries you make.
• Provide any information necessary for the operation and security of our site.

Email communications
All new Consumer NZ members are opted in to receive email marketing communications. You may choose to remove yourself from any email newsletter by following the "unsubscribe" prompt at the bottom of each email or by updating your preferences in your My Consumer profile.

Links to other websites

Our websites provide links to other websites when we consider you may be interested in the contents of those sites. We do not endorse any third party sites or their content and we have no control over the conduct of the companies or organisations operating those sites.

Before you disclose any personal information to another site, we advise you to check its terms and conditions, including its privacy and security policies.

More information

Complaints
Consumer NZ is committed to dealing quickly and appropriately with any complaint you make about your privacy.

If you are concerned that this privacy policy may have been breached or your privacy has been compromised, please email us immediately via feedback@consumer.org.nz or call Customer Services on 0800 266 786.

For more information on privacy see the Privacy Commissioner's website.

Other Consumer NZ policies
More information about our policies for protecting your personal information can be found in our Terms and conditions and our Security policy.