Our commitment to protect your privacy
Your privacy is important to us. We have put together the following privacy statement in order to demonstrate our firm commitment to provide privacy to our website visitors and customers. We understand how important it is to protect your personal information. This document sets out our privacy policy commitment in respect of personal information we hold about you and what we do with that information.
We recognise that any personal information we collect about you will only be used for the purposes we have collected it or as allowed under the law. It is important to us that you are confident that any personal information we hold about you will be treated in a way which ensures protection of your personal information.
Our commitment in respect of personal information is to abide by the New Zealand Privacy Principles for the protection of personal information, as set out in the Privacy Act 1993 (the Privacy Act) and any other relevant law.
Use of Your Information
When you use the ApprovedMortgages website to request a call-back from a registered mortgage broker, in order to fulfill the service provided by this website, we will require personal information such as your name, phone number, email address and enquiry type details in order to:
- fulfil requests for this websites mortgage broker call-back services
- communicate with you and respond to your enquiries
- contact you from time to time about our products and services
- conduct occasional research about our products and services
- We may also automatically collect usage information about your engagement with our website to improve the user experience, such as pages viewed, IP address, time spent on site etc.
Do we disclose your personal information?
We may disclose your personal information:
- to our employees, officers, registered Mortgage Brokers, related bodies corporate, contractors or service providers for the purposes of operation of our website or our business, fulfilling requests by you, and to otherwise provide products and services to you including, without limitation, web hosting providers, IT systems administrators, couriers, payment processors, data entry service providers, electronic network administrators, debt collectors, and professional advisors such as accountants, solicitors, business advisors and consultants;
- to prospective funders, third parties or other intermediaries in relation to your finance requirements (including a prospective funder’s mortgage insurer (if any), any person with whom a funder proposes to enter into contractual arrangements, any person who provides a guarantee or security and any trustee and any assignee or potential assignee of a funder’s rights);
- to other organisations that are involved in managing or administering your finance such as third party suppliers, printing and postal services, call centres;
- to associated businesses that may want to market products to you;
- to companies that provide information and infrastructure systems to us;
- to anybody who represents you, such as finance brokers, lawyers and accountants;
- to anyone, where you have provided us consent;
- where we are required or authorised to do so by law, such as under the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act 2009;
- to investors, agents or advisers, or any entity that has an interest in our business; or
- to your employer, referees, credit reporting agencies, identity verification services or anyone making an enquiry about you that you have authorised.
We will only disclose your personal information in accordance with our obligations under the Privacy Act. Prior to disclosing any of your personal information to another person or organisation, we will take all reasonable steps to satisfy ourselves that:
(a) the person or organisation has a commitment to protecting your personal information at least equal to our commitment, or
(b) you have consented to us making the disclosure.
We may use cloud storage to store the personal information we hold about you. The cloud storage and the IT servers may be located outside New Zealand.
In the event that we enter into a corporate transaction, such as a reorganization, merger, sale, joint venture, assignment, transfer, or other disposition of all or any portion of our business, assets, or stock, personal information that we have collected may be transferred in the course of that corporate transaction to the relevant third party purchaser, joint venture partner, merged entity, assignee or similar party.
Business without identifying you
In most circumstances it will be necessary for us to identify you in order to successfully arrange for a registered mortgage broker to contact you, however, where it is lawful and practicable to do so, we will offer you the opportunity of doing business with us without providing us with personal information, for example, if you make general inquiries about interest rates or current promotional offers.
You may choose to interact with our website anonymously, but we will not be able to invite our participating finance brokers to contact you unless you provide your personal information.
Site users who complete our enquiry form and request a call from a broker – how safe and secure is your personal information that we hold?
We will take reasonable steps to protect your personal information by storing it in a secure environment. If you chose to complete our broker call-back request form you are choosing to provide us with your personal information. We may store your personal information in paper and electronic form. We will also take reasonable steps to protect any personal information from misuse, loss and unauthorised access, modification or disclosure. For example, personal information that you submit on our website are stored in electronic systems that have access controls in place.
We limit the information that we send to the regisitered mortgage brokers and require that they only use shared personal information to perform the services requested in accordance with this Privacy Policy and have adequate security measures in place to protect any of your shared personal information.
We will destroy or permanently de-identify personal information if it is no longer required for the purposes for which it was collected.
We do not sell or rent personal information to third parties.
The personal information you provide via this webservice will be transferred to the registered mortgage broker to enable them to contact you and establish if they are able to assist with the mortgage broker service you require. Whilst all registered mortgage brokers are required to comply with all laws and regulations, we do not have any control over or responsibility for how those mortgage brokers uses the data you provide to them via this website; however, registered mortgage brokers are also responsible for protecting and using your data in accordance with New Zealand laws.
We will never collect sensitive information about you without your explicit consent. The information we hold will be secure, accurate and up to date. You can check the information that we hold about you by emailing us. If you find any inaccuracies, we will delete or correct it promptly.
We will only release account and other personal information if we believe release is appropriate to comply with law, facilitate court proceedings, enforce or apply our terms and conditions, or protect the rights, property, or our safety, our users, or others.
Updating Your Personal Information
We will provide you with ways in which you can alter your personal data, including changing your email address, password, phone number, etc. You may also opt out of non-administrative emails at any time by clicking on the unsubscribe link in promotional emails, or by emailing us at contact@approvedmortgages.co.nz.
Collecting Usage Information
We collect usage information when you visit our website in order to improve the user experience. We use Cookies and Pixel tags to collect this data. Cookies are small files containing a string of characters that are stored in a browser-related file on your computer’s hard drive when you use our website. Pixel tags are small graphic files that are placed on our pages. Cookies and Pixel tags are widely used on most major websites. No personally identifiable information is tracked or kept.
Third Party Advertising
Third party vendors, including Google, show our ads on sites on the internet. These vendors use their own cookies or pixel tags to serve adverts to you based on your prior visits to our website. We are not responsible for the information practices of these third parties.
You may opt out of Google’s use of cookies by visiting the Google Advertising opt-out page.
Google Analytics
We use Google Analytics on our website to track your actions and help us optimise our site for conversions and usability. While we can see data gathered over a timeframe, we do not collect personally identifying information from any source as part of the terms of service of Google Analytics.
A condition of our use of Google Analytics is that we make reasonable endeavours to bring to your attention the following statement:
This website uses Google Analytics, a web analytics service provided by Google, Inc. (“Google”). Google Analytics uses “cookies”, which are text files placed on your computer, to help the website analyse how users use the site. The information generated by the cookie about your use of the website (including your IP address) will be transmitted to and stored by Google on servers in the United States. Google will use this information for the purpose of evaluating your use of the website, compiling reports on website activity for website operators and providing other services relating to website activity and internet usage. Google may also transfer this information to third parties where required to do so by law, or where such third parties process the information on Google’s behalf. Google will not associate your IP address with any other data held by Google. You may refuse the use of cookies by selecting the appropriate settings on your browser, however please note that if you do this you may not be able to use the full functionality of this website. By using this website, you consent to the processing of data about you by Google in the manner and for the purposes set out above.
We have implemented Google Analytics demographic and interest reporting based on the Google Display Network in order to provide information about users that is used to optimise our website. Any data collected by Google for the purposes of Google Analytics will be treated according to Google’s Privacy Policy, if you would like to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics, then you can do so using the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on.
Do Not Track
If you are using a modern browser, you have the option to enable a “Do Not Track” feature in the browser’s privacy settings.
This has no effect on whether we collect any information you directly submit to us, but may restrict our ability to measure your anonymous path through our website or certain information about your browser/operating system.
If you would like to enable Do Not Track, you can read more information about it here.
Please read the Facebook privacy policy for more information on Facebook Pixel
Emailing
We may provide tools on this website for you to tell a friend about products, and send out wish lists. These tools must not be misused in any way to send spam or other content which would violate our Privacy Policy or Terms and Conditions. We do not permanently store, sell, or rent these email messages or the email addresses.
Updates to Our Information Practices
From time to time, we make changes to our information practices or alter the functionality of our website. We reserve the right to update this Privacy Policy at any time. Any changes will be immediately effective upon the posting of the updated policy. Your continued use of the Website after these updates are posted represents your consent to the terms of the new Privacy Policy. Please regularly check this Privacy Policy for any such updates.
Complaints
If you are dissatisfied with how we have dealt with your personal information, or you have a complaint about our compliance with the Privacy Act, you may contact our privacy officer at contact@approvedmortgages.co.nz.
We will acknowledge your complaint within seven days. We will usually provide you with a decision on your complaint within 30 days.
If you are dissatisfied with the response of our privacy officer you may make a complaint to the Privacy Commissioner which can be contacted either using the website www.privacy.org.nz or on 04-474 7590 (Wellington) or 09-302 8680 (Auckland).
How to Contact Us
If you have any questions or concerns about our Privacy Policy or its implementation, or if you believe there are inaccuracies in your account information you can contact us as follows:
Approved Mortgages
Registered Office: 159 Kitchener Road,
Milford
Auckland 0620
0800 5626669 (0800LOANNOW)
contact@approvedmortgages.co.nz
