Property Academy’s Privacy Statement

The Privacy Statement tells you how we deal with your personal information.  It describes how we collect, use, store, share and dispose of your personal information.  This policy also explains how we use cookies to improve our website and target advertising.

By engaging Property Academy to provide you with our services, we will assume you have read and agreed to our Privacy Statement.

We will deal with your personal information in accordance with the Privacy Act 2020 and this Privacy Statement.

To the extent that there is any conflict between the Terms and Conditions of the Property Academy Website and those of Property Academy’s products and services, the terms and conditions for the specific products and services will prevail.  Property Academy reserves the right to vary the information on the Property Academy Website, including this Privacy Statement, at any time without notice.  By engaging (and continuing to engage) Property Academy to provide you with our services, we will assume you have read and agreed to our Privacy Statement, including any changes and/or updates we may make from time to time.

Who is collecting your information?

This policy applies to all your personal information collected from you (or about you where you have authorised another party to share your information) by any of the brands owned by Property Academy.

How we will collect information from you

In most cases we collect personal information directly from you when you:

• Call us or email us
• Talk to an employee or contractor of Property Academy
• Take out products with us or make a claim
• Subscribe to our newsletter or an e-book
• Participate in surveys
• Provide credit card information
• Use an online form or access our resources online
• Leave a comment on social media
• Apply for a job with us.

When you visit our Website we collect information about your visit using cookies to gather some of this information.  We explain this in more detail below.

Sometimes third parties provide your information to us.  We expect all such third parties to have your consent before sharing your information with us. We ask these third parties to confirm that they have your permission before they share your data and we check their relevant data protection/privacy statements with that in mind.

Unless you expressly tell us not to, we may collect or share personal information about you with third parties for profiling purposes.  This information improves our ability to understand what products and services may be beneficial for you, as well as helping us to operate our business.

In addition, we may collect personal information about you from other third parties including:

• Your health practitioners
• Public registers and publicly available sources
• Inland Revenue
• Other insurers.

By being a Property Academy client, you authorise Property Academy to obtain your personal information from third parties as described in this Privacy Statement and authorise any third party who holds that personal information to disclose your personal information to us.

You can choose not to provide us with this information, but it may limit what we can do for you and the relevancy of future information that we can provide you.

We may collect a range of personal information from you

We’ll collect, store and use information which we believe is relevant to help provide you with the product or service you want and to help us operate our business.  This information could include:

• Personal details including your name, date of birth, gender, payment information, financial information such as your IRD number (which we will not use as a unique identifier in our systems or records) and income, next of kin, who you live with, occupation details
• Recordings of interactions with our support team
• Details of your assets, for example home, contents, car, KiwiSaver, retirement savings
• Health records (please note that all health information is subject to the additional protection of the Health Information Privacy Code 2020)
• Relevant information relating to a claim which may include further health information or other documentation (for example photos, videos, audio recordings)
• Your IP address and information about the technology you’re using when you access our Website.

How we collect information about you digitally

To improve some of the online services available through our Website, we use web measurement tools including cookies to record information about your visit.

Cookies are small text files placed in your browser when you visit websites. Our Website uses cookies to:

• Make parts of our Website work, or easier to use
• Find out how people use our Website
• Support our advertising and marketing.

You can choose to disable cookies and if you disable it you can still use our Website, but you may not get full use of all functionality.

We use cookies from Facebook and Google to advertise to you after you visit our Website.

Other companies, including Facebook and Google, may use cookies to track how you use our Website and get an idea of what you’re interested in. Those other companies use this information to show you personalised advertising across the internet. This advertising could be from us, or someone else.

If you’re logged in to a Facebook or Google account while browsing our Website, they may link the information they collect from our Website with the information in those accounts. For example, if you visit our Website while logged in to Facebook, it’ll connect that tracking to your Facebook profile to help it personalise ads.

We cannot see the information the cookies from other companies collect. Those companies process and save this information themselves. Facebook and Google store the information they collect outside New Zealand.

We use cookies from Google Analytics to help us improve our Website.

We use Google Analytics to collect information about your visit and use that information to improve our Website. We don’t use Google Analytics to track, collect, or match information in a way that could personally identify you.

Google Analytics collects:

• The country you’re in
• Your age and gender
• The platform you used to find us (such as Facebook, Twitter, or Google search)
• The browser and operating system you used
• The network you used
• The kind of device you used
• Where in our website you went, and for how long
• Whether you came to our site from one of our targeted campaigns or Google Ads.

Google Analytics stores the information it collects outside New Zealand.

We do not control what information Google Analytics (or other online platforms) collect/s or where it is stored, although as explained above, our Website makes use of some information shared by Google Analytics and Facebook with us.  Check your Google, Facebook and other browser/app settings, including their cookies, to understand and be comfortable with the personal information those third parties may be collecting about you, and how they are using and storing it.

We protect your personal information

We take every reasonable action to protect the personal information that you give us.

We may temporarily hold hard copy information about you at our physical offices.  When we do, we scan your information into our cloud-based system and destroy the hard copies securely.

We store your personal information in a secure cloud service based in Asia Pacific, and we have taken security safeguards that are in line with industry practice, and comparable to those under New Zealand law.  This includes taking reasonable steps to encrypt personal information while it is in transit or being stored by Property Academy.  Property Academy regularly updates its technology to provide protection for your personal and financial information.

We do all we reasonably can to make sure other companies we work with are reputable and can meet our privacy and security requirements, as well as requirements of the Privacy Act 2020.

How we will use your information

The personal information we hold about you will help us to:

• Communicate with you so you stay up to date with reports, statements, newsletters and details of our products and services
• Consider your application for Property Academy product and services
• Keep your records (including contact details) up to date
• Help us to design and improve our products and services
• Help us to understand your financial needs so that we can provide you quality products and services
• Service and manage our relationship with you
• Keep you informed about products and services we believe you may be interested in, unless you tell us otherwise or opt out
• Conduct data analysis and market research to understand, tailor and improve your experience with us
• Verify your identity.

We may use your information in accordance with any other purposes that you have authorised.

We need to share some of your personal information so we can provide products or services to you

We work with other companies to manage some of our services or to assist us with understanding our client base so we can provide you with information on products and services that would be most beneficial for you.  These companies may collect and store the personal information you provide and have their own privacy and data protection statements.  Property Academy does everything it reasonably can to protect your data from unauthorised use or disclosure by any third party that Property Academy engages.  This includes ensuring the third party has their own privacy and data protection statement, has had no significant privacy breaches and complies with their own statements and relevant legislation, to the extent we can access that information.

The only other time we’ll share your personal information is when it’s necessary to comply with the law (for example, to help with investigating a criminal offence, or sharing information with Inland Revenue or the Financial Markets Authority).

How we may disclose your information

Other than as set out in the “Using your personal information” section above, Property Academy does not rent, share, sell or trade your personal information to others outside the Property Academy group of companies or brands.

Property Academy may share your personal information within the Property Academy group of companies and brands and with our third party service providers.

Property Academy may provide aggregate statistics about our customers, sales and traffic patterns and related website information to reputable third parties.  These statistics will not include any identifiable information about any individual.

You have the right to access and correct your information

You have the right to ask for a copy of any personal information we hold about you.  You also have the right to ask us to correct your information if you think it’s wrong.

To request information about yourself or correct your personal information, contact Property Academy by email to support@propertyacademy.net

We don’t hold your information forever

Call information is securely stored for up to 10 years after the date of a call with Property Academy.  After this time, the call information will be securely destroyed.  Other information is held for as long as you are a client with Property Academy.  Once the relationship no longer exists your personal information will be securely held for a minimum of 7 years before being securely destroyed (both in hard and electronic copy).

We’re not responsible for websites we link to

A link to another site doesn’t mean we support all the content on that site.  We’re not responsible for the content of websites we link to or the privacy practices of those websites and we have no control over the activities of those websites.

We recommend checking the terms and condition and privacy policies of any websites before disclosing any personal information.

More information

Additional information on privacy rights and issues can be found on the Privacy Commissioner’s website.

If you are concerned there may have been a breach of your privacy or this policy, please contact our Privacy Officer on support@propertyacademy.net