Privacy policy

Village Guide (we, us, our) complies with the New Zealand Privacy Act 1993 (the Act) when dealing with personal information. Personal information is information about an identifiable individual (a natural person).

This policy sets out how we will collect, use, disclose and protect your personal information.

This policy does not limit or exclude any of your rights under the Act. If you wish to seek further information on the Act, see www.privacy.org.nz.

We may change this policy by uploading a revised policy onto our website. The change will apply from the date that we upload the revised policy.

We collect personal information about you from:

• you, when you provide that personal information to us, including via the website and any related service, through any registration or subscription process, through any contact with us (e.g. telephone call or email), or when you use Village Guide or related services and products
• third parties where you have authorised this or the information is publicly available.

If possible, we will collect personal information from you directly.

When you make a village or care home enquiry through our website your contact details are passed on to the facility you are enquiring about so they can contact you directly. Any further personal information you provide directly to the facility will be governed by the facility’s privacy policy.

We will use your personal information:

• to provide our website and related services and products to you
• to market our website and related services and products to you, including contacting you electronically (e.g. by text or email for this purpose)
• to provide you with newsletters or other publications that you have subscribed to
• to improve our website and related services and products that we provide to you
• to respond to communications from you, including a complaint
• to conduct research and statistical analysis (on an anonymised basis)
• to protect and/or enforce our legal rights and interests, including defending any claim
• for any other purpose authorised by you or the Act.

The information you provide us is stored in our database and used by us in accordance with this policy.

You will not receive communications from us unless you select the 'tick box' agreeing to be added to our database. If you no longer want to receive communications from us, you may opt-out via the unsubscribe link included in our communications to you. We do not:

• provide customer lists or contact details (other than contact details to retirement villages and care home operators as authorised by you) to our advertisers or business partners
• sell or distribute our membership database.

We may disclose your personal information to:

• any business that supports our services and products, including any person that hosts or maintains any underlying IT system or data centre that we use to provide the website or other services and products
• retirement villages and care homes as authorised by you
• other third parties (for anonymised statistical information)
• a person who can require us to supply your personal information (e.g. a regulatory authority)
• any other person authorised by the Act or another law (e.g. a law enforcement agency)
• any other person authorised by you.

Third parties are prohibited from using your personally identifiable information for any other purpose.

Subject to certain grounds for refusal set out in the Act, you have the right to access your readily retrievable personal information that we hold and to request a correction to your personal information. Before you exercise this right, we will need evidence to confirm that you are the individual to whom the personal information relates.

In respect of a request for correction, if we think the correction is reasonable and we are reasonably able to change the personal information, we will make the correction. If we do not make the correction, we will take reasonable steps to note on the personal information that you requested the correction.

If you want to exercise either of the above rights, email us at info@villageguide.co.nz. Your email should provide evidence of who you are and set out the details of your request (e.g. the personal information, or the correction, that you are requesting).

We may charge you our reasonable costs of providing to you copies of your personal information or correcting that information.

While we take reasonable steps to maintain secure internet connections, if you provide us with personal information over the internet, the provision of that information is at your own risk.

If you follow a link on our website to another site, the owner of that site will have its own privacy policy relating to your personal information. We encourage you to review that site’s privacy policy before you provide personal information.

We use cookies (an alphanumeric identifier that we transfer to your computer’s hard drive so that we can recognise your browser) to monitor your use of the website. You may disable cookies by changing the settings on your browser, although this may mean that you cannot use all of the features of our website.

We use re-marketing features within Google Analytics. This allows us to show our display advertising across the internet, on other websites, via third-party ad serving vendors, including Google.

Village Guide and third-party vendors, including Google, use first-party cookies (such as the Google Analytics cookie) and third-party cookies (such as the DoubleClick cookie) together to inform, optimise, and serve ads based on past visits to our website.

You can opt-out of Google Analytics tracking for Display Advertising and customise the Google Display Network ads shown to you using the Google Ads Preferences Manager.