Introduction
PublicVoice is a New Zealand-based research and public consultation company. When carrying out our activities we may collect private information. This policy outlines our approach to the handling and protection of private information.
PublicVoice takes privacy very seriously. We have created this Privacy Policy to outline how we protect and use your personal identifying information. Personal identifying information means any information about you which can be used to identify you as an individual. This excludes information where your personal data has been removed (anonymous data).
Visiting our website
A cookie is a piece of information that a website sends to your browser when you access information at that site. Cookies are either stored in memory (session cookies) or placed on your hard disk (persistent cookies). The PublicVoice website does not use persistent cookies. Upon closing your browser, the session cookie set by this website is destroyed and no personal information is maintained which might identify you should you visit our website at a later date.
A visit to our website allows your IP address to be stored along with the names of the city and country from which you are accessing our website. Information that tells us how you found our website is also stored. The stored information is anonymous because it does not include your name or e-mail address.
Privacy legislation and the Code of Practice
Surveys
Any personal information collected by PublicVoice during a survey is protected by privacy legislation (Privacy Act 2020) and the Code of Practice of the Research Association New Zealand. PublicVoice researchers are members of the Research Association New Zealand (RANZ). All PublicVoice researchers must observe RANZ’s code of practice.
Key provisions of the Code of Practice that protect the privacy of personal information are:
1. Your personal information is kept confidential. It is not released to our clients or to third parties unless you have expressly given your permission for this to happen.
2. If you have participated in a survey, you may at any time ask us to remove your responses and personal details from our file.
3. Unless stated otherwise, our reports to clients do not allow the clients to identify who has participated in the survey or what their responses were. While we may release the survey data to our clients, your name and identifying details are removed so that the information is anonymous.
4. Personal information is stored in our computer system as personal information only for as long as is necessary. When it is no longer required as personal information all identifying information is removed from the file.
5. We may ask you to join our research panel. Participation in our research panel is entirely voluntary. If you agree to join, we will keep your personal information on file. However, you may at any time contact us and ask for your details to be removed.
Public consultation activities
PublicVoice undertakes public consultation activities on behalf of Government Agencies. Submissions received during public consultation may be subject to the Official Information Act 1982. Therefore, submissions could become public information at the end of the consultation period. The release of any public information is the responsibility of the government agency undertaking the public consultation.
Your privacy rights
While your information remains identifiable, you can gain access to personally identifiable information held by PublicVoice. You can contact the PublicVoice Privacy Officer to update any personally identifiable information. To update any personally identifiable information, you will need to verify your identity. If it is not possible to provide you with access to the information, PublicVoice will provide you with a written notice explaining the reasons for not being able to process your request.
If you believe that PublicVoice has breached the New Zealand Information Privacy Principles or New Zealand’s market research industry’s code, you can complain to our Privacy Officer. The Privacy Officer will investigate your complaint and advise you if the complaint has been upheld and if any action has been taken. If you are not satisfied with our handling of your complaint, you may make a complaint to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner (https://www.privacy.org.nz/about-us/contact/).
Data security
We will take all reasonable steps and apply appropriate technical and organisational measures to maintain the security of any personal information we receive from you and protect it from loss, misuse, and unauthorised access, disclosure or modification.
We use various security techniques to store and protect your information, including secure IT systems and firewalls. Any digital transfer of personal information is secured using various security methods. PublicVoice is constantly reviewing its information security technology and practices.
We will only keep your personal information when we consider it necessary for one of the purposes for which you have disclosed it. If keeping your personal information is no longer necessary, we will take reasonable steps to destroy or de-identify your personal information safely, if required.
In the highly unlikely event of a data breach, PublicVoice will act promptly to comply with the Privacy Act 2020. As required by the Privacy Act, PublicVoice will notify the Privacy Commissioner and any affected people as soon as possible. This notification shall include such things as the nature of the breach, the personal information possibly involved, and measures taken to address the breach (including to reduce the harm of negative consequences) and the contact details from whom affected individuals can obtain further information.
How we store and protect personal information
We store the personal information we collect from you in accordance with our obligations under the Privacy Act and take reasonable steps to ensure the security of your personal information. We use trusted third-party providers to store and process our data and ensure that our cloud-based platforms meet New Zealand privacy requirements. For more information on privacy practices for our key third-party providers, see the following links:
Sharing your personal information
We do not sell or rent your personal information to any third party. However, we do share your personal information with trusted third parties that work on our behalf to deliver our services to you (such as for computing and storage purposes, and for email correspondence).
Third parties, which we share your personal information with include:
- Microsoft, our cloud hosting and computing infrastructure provider
- Alchemer, our data collection tool provider
- Voxco, our data collection tool provider
- Qrious, our data collection tool provider
We do not authorise third parties to use or disclose your personal information except for the purpose of providing the service we request from them. All third parties, which we disclose your personal information to, are subject to obligations under the New Zealand Privacy Act 2020 to protect your information.
Contact us
For any privacy-related inquiries, please contact us by phone at 04 909 7463 or email at [email protected]. PublicVoice’s physical address is
Suite 2
5 Bouverie Street
Petone
Lower Hutt, 5012
This Privacy Policy was last updated: 23 February 2023.