This site is owned and operated by Taranaki Regional Council using software licensed from Social Pinpoint. For details on how we collect and protect your personal information, refer to our Privacy Policy below. For details of how Social Pinpoint may access personal information, please refer to Social Pinpoint’s Privacy Policy.
Taranaki Regional Council (referred to as “TRC”, “we”, “our” or “us”) is committed to protecting the privacy of your information.
This privacy policy tells you about our collection and use of your personal information through your use of the Have your say Taranaki website (haveyoursay.trc.govt.nz).
The collection and use of personal information by Taranaki Regional Council is regulated by the Privacy Act 2020. Under this Act, personal information may be collected only for a lawful purpose connected with a function or activity of the council and only if necessary for that purpose. Such information must, as a general rule, be collected directly from the individual concerned and that person must be told why the information is needed.
The Taranaki Regional Council will use personal information provided by website visitors only for the reasons it was given.
This Privacy Policy does not apply to third party websites or digital services which may be linked to content published by either Social Pinpoint or Taranaki Regional Council. We recommend you read the privacy statement of the relevant service when you access these third party sites.
Why do we request personal information?
Taranaki Regional Council collects your personal information for several reasons, which includes, but is not limited to:
- to enable us to respond to you should you request that
- to provide us with the demographic information to determine the extent to which the feedback collected is representative of the community
- to allow us to gather participation data (such as numbers interacting from specified areas) with specific topics to better inform our feedback to Council
- to understand the reach and representation achieved and address any gaps to ensure diverse representational engagement across Taranaki
- to ensure that any one participant or spammers and trolls are not unduly influencing the feedback results
What information is collected?
The type of personal information collected will vary and may include (but is not limited to):
- Your name
- Email address
- Username
- Profile picture
- Phone number
- Your IP address
- User-agent string
- Other unique ID numbers
- Social network account IDs
- Physical address, postcode, or other locational attributes
- Demographic information such as age, gender, etc.
- Information about your preferences
- Your recorded thoughts, ideas, opinions, etc. as expressed by you. This may include sensitive information if you provide political opinions.
How do we use your information?
Social Pinpoint and Taranaki Regional Council may access and use the information collected by the Operator (personal or otherwise) in order to:
- allow you to access our Software
- respond to your enquiries
- maintain our licensed Software
- detect and rectify fraud or other behaviour that violates any terms of use
- respond to service requests from the Operator
- comply with our contractual or legal obligations and resolve any disputes that we may have
- monitor sites to ensure adequate safety and security
- conduct de-identified research, analytics and business development
- improve our Software and services
- if otherwise required or authorised by law
Email notifications
If you subscribe to receive notifications about upcoming projects or other engagement activities, the email address you provided will be used by us to send you that information. You can unsubscribe from these notifications at any time.
Sharing of your personal information
Access to your personal information is confined to authorised users only, which includes employees of TRC on a need-to-know basis, our website administrators, and Social Pinpoint.
TRC respects the privacy of your information and will take all reasonable measures to prevent unauthorised access to, or unlawful disclosure of, your personal information.
Publicly available information
When you sign up to and use Have your say Taranaki, some of the information you provide will be publicly available.
Information that is available to the public is limited to your username and any comments you leave under that username in the forums or other feedback tools published to Have your say Taranaki. As above, you can use an anonymous user name if you do not want your full name attached to your comments.
Feedback (including overall results of polls and surveys, and in some instances, quotes from forums and surveys with the username referenced) may be published in publicly available reports at the end of the consultation period.
You may use Have your say Taranaki to make submissions to TRC pursuant to the Local Government Act 2002 (for example, submissions on annual plans or long term plans).By taking part in the public submission process, submitters agree to any personal information (including names and contact details) in their submission being made available to the public and published on our website, and for the information collected to be held in accordance with TRC’s general Privacy Policy available at trc.govt.nz.
Storage of personal information
Information collected through this website will be held by Social Pinpoint in accordance with its privacy policy. Social Pinpoint is an offshore service provider based on Australia so personal information collected will be stored in their server located in Sydney, Australia. The information will also be downloaded on TRC servers with privacy protections in place. We comply with the requirements of the Privacy Act in relation to the transfer of personal information offshore.
Access and correction
If you would like to access, update, correct, or delete the personal information that TRC is holding about you, you are welcome to make these requests by emailing TRC at haveyoursay@trc.govt.nz.
We will provide you with access to your personal information unless we are required or authorised to refuse such access by law.
You may also request a change or correction of personal information that we hold about you. When you are a registered user you will have the ability to correct your personal information at your discretion through the ‘edit profile’ function. You may also choose to contact us to request a change or correction of your personal information. We will take all necessary steps to accommodate your request unless we are required or authorised to refuse that request by law.
If you want to check personal information that we hold about you or have any other access or correction request, please contact us at haveyoursay@trc.govt.nz. Please quote your name and address and, if possible, provide brief details of what information you want a copy of (this helps us to more readily locate your information).
Changes to this Policy
We reserve the right to modify this policy from time to time, at our sole discretion. If we make a material change to the Privacy Policy we will notify you and the modified policy shall be effective once we notify you of the change. If we do not make any material amendments then we will post the modified policy on our website and it shall be effective once posted. We recommend that you regularly check our website to make sure you are aware of our most up-to-date policy.
Contact us
To contact us about our Privacy Policy, compliance with any applicable privacy laws, or to modify or delete your personal data, please email us at: haveyoursay@trc.govt.nz
We will review all messages received and respond to each message upon due consideration. We may require further information to respond to your message, or may refer you to the Social Pinpoint when appropriate.
