Introduction
Thanks for visiting our website. The terms “we,” “us,” “our” and “NZ House Sitters” refers to our Company. The terms “you” “user” “users” “member” and “members” refers to the user interacting with the Website, contributing content on the Website. Terminology is not case sensitive.
This Privacy Policy describes our policies for the collection, use and disclosure of information about you in connection with your use of our services, including those offered through our Website, emails, and mobile applications. NZ House Sitters provides an introductory service/meeting place for home owners and house sitters who required each others services (collectively, the Services), and for no other purpose. The Services are available on the NZ House Sitters Site at www.nzhousesitters.co.nz (Site).
When you use the Service, you consent to our collection, use and disclosure of information about you as described in this Privacy Policy. We comply with the relevant privacy principles as required under the Privacy Act in Australia.
Contact us at info[at]nzhousesitters.co.nz if you have any questions or problems regarding the use of your Personal Data and we will gladly assist you.
By using this site or/and our services, you consent to the Processing of your Personal Data as described in this Privacy Policy.
Collection of Data
The data we collect will come from yourself or third parties third parties – other companies within our group, or affiliate or partner companies that are connected with us, public records or bodies or private organisations. We may source Personal Information about you from a third party to analyse website traffic.
When you are simply viewing our website, you are not providing us with any of your personal information. If you choose to register on our site, you will need to provide the details on the respective registration forms. Fields that are required are clearly marked.
Where possible and within lawful, individuals have the option of not identifying themselves (remaining anonymous or using a pseudonym) when dealing with NZ House Sitters.
Personal information we collect from you
What details we store from members and what we use it for
At the time of registration, home owners and house sitters will need to provide their names, email address, username and password. Users can choose to use their real name or Pseudonym. House Sitters need to pay the membership fee at the time of registration, which is handled by a third party processer called PayPal. No credit card of bank account details are retained or stored on our server.
At checkout, we will collect your name, email address, username, and password. This information is used to setup your account for our site. If you are redirected to an offsite payment gateway to complete your payment, we may store this information in a temporary session variable to setup your account when you return to our site.
When logged in, we use cookies to track some of your activity on our site including logins, visits, and page views.
We only use the personal information to facilitate members’ full and effective use of our site. Under no circumstances will we disclose any sensitive private information which includes full names, email addresses or passwords to a third party unless required to do so by law. Once registered and logged in, all users can see and edit their own personal information at any time (except their username, which is unchangeable).
If required by law, we may individually identify any member to a third party. Furthermore we may share your personal information with third parties if your use of our site violates our policy, terms of service, or other usage guidelines, or if it is deemed reasonably necessary by this site to protect the site, our legal rights and/or property;
We may also share your personal information with a third party if this site is purchased by a third party, in which case that third party will be able to use the data in the same manner as set forth in this policy.
NZ House Sitters does collect statistical data from members in order to track site usage patterns and we reserve the right to do so.
NZ House Sitters keeps a copy of all your discussions with other members. These discussions are found in your messages They are visible only by the contacts with whom you are communicating and by the our moderators to allow them to intervene, in particular:
– in case of notification of a non-compliance with our Terms and Conditions,
– for fraud prevention purposes, for verification of our members’ compliance with our Terms and Conditions, or for user support.
We collect information about your use of our Platform (such as your date of registration, listings published, feedback received, etc.) which may be displayed on your member profile or Dashboard.
Members can elect to have their Photo ID verified. These images are only stored on our server until they are moderated. After moderation they are completed removed from our server.
Who sees the personal information provided?
Website administrators and the account holder itself can see and edit information such a the email address, first name and last name, display name and the information provided in their listing.
Profiles/Ads Uploaded to our Site
Both Membership types can upload a profile/ad to appear in our search results and database.
We urge users not to provide any personal information on their ads such as an email address or phone number. In the event that a user publishes such information in their ad, and we come across it, we reserve the right to remove these details from the profile/ad and notify the posting user of the changes. Furthermore we will not be held responsible or liable for any claims, issues or loses resulting in users publishing sensitive information in their ad. All initial communications must be through our online messaging system. From there, users may share each others email or phone number to discuss further.
Non-logged in Visitors to the Site will be able to view house sitters and home owners ads, but do not have access to the private messaging system.
House sitters registered on our site will be able to message home owners through our private messaging system. House sitters are also able to review home owners as long there is an initial communication. House sitters cannot contact other house sitters.
Home owners registered on our site will be able to messages house sitters through our private messaging system. Home owners are also able to review house sitters as long there is an initial communication. Home owners cannot contact or view contact details of other house sitters.
Sharing of new home owners ads to social media and in our daily email alerts
Selected new house sitting positions will be shared to our social media channels. House Sitters can sign up to receive daily email alerts of new house sitting positions, which will show them all new house sitting positions posted in the area they specified at the time of subscribing. In both instances, only photos, short description, dates, display name of the home owner and the suburb of the house sit will be shared.
Names
At the time of registration, users provide their first name (can be real or Pseudonyms) as their display name (the name used in the NZ House Sitters community). The field is clearly explained on the registration forms. If a user decides to provide their true first name & last name in the “first name” section, the responsibility and consequences lies on them and not us. At all times, Members can change their Display Name, via their account settings. Any bookings and messages will display the users first and last names.
Media
Although we use a plugin to remove any EXIF GPS details, we do not offer guarantees and therefore strongly recommend that if you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included.
References
House Sitters may provide us a shareable link to the references and other relevant information they may want to share with home owners such as police clearances, photos e.g. This link should be provided via the “Link to References” link on the their listing.
The reference link can only be viewed by home owners. This ensures that the privacy of the referees is protected and that the house sitter has control over who sees their documents. It is up to the house sitter to ensure they have permission from a referee to share their reference document and to remove and information that the referee does not consent to being shared.
Reviews
When you leave a review & rating directly for NZ House Sitters, we like to publish, in part or in whole, selected testimonials about the usefulness of the site and members’ experiences in general. You agree that when publishing a review about your experience using our site, that this review remains our property and we have the right to use it anywhere on our website, or business channels such as our social media accounts or for any online or paper based advertising.
Reviews & Ratings left for NZ House Sitters or for it’s members will only show the first name/display name the user provided at the time of registration or in their account settings. By default this will in most cases, be the first name of the user, unless at the time of registering the user has provided their full name as their display name.
Payments
House Sitter Membership payments are processed through PayPal. NZ House Sitters does not process or store credit card information on its servers. All credit card payments are processed by PayPal with PCI DSS compliance. PayPal’s Terms of Service including, without limitation, the User Agreement and Privacy Policy apply to paying Members.
We do not do auto-renewals or recurring payments. House Sitters are able to renew their membership 1 month before it expires. Email reminders to renew are sent out 14 days and 4 days prior to expiry. The payment processor send us receipts which we securely retain for verification. The receipts do not contain credit or debit card Numbers.
IP Addresses
We may collect information about your computer, including where available your IP address, operating system and browser type, for system administration and to report aggregate information to our advertisers. This is statistical data about our users’ browsing actions and patterns, and does not identify any individual.
Contact Forms
When choosing to contact us via our contact form, we may collect and store information about your use of contact forms. We also may store information that your computer or mobile device provides to us in connection with your use of the Service, such as your browser type, type of computer or mobile device, browser language, phone number, unique device identifier, advertising identifier, location (including geo-location, beacon based location, and GPS location), and requested and referring URLs.
Photo ID
Members can elect to upload one form of Photo ID for a free verification check. The uploaded file is used internally for identity verification only. Upon upload, the Photo ID is stored in a secure and private folder, and are not accessible by anyone apart from the website administrator. The Photo ID is examined by a website moderator and is automatically deleted from the server as soon as validated by a moderator. No information you provide in the form below or your proof of ID document is kept after the moderation process. It is immediately deleted from our records. We will notify you via email of the outcome of your verification request. If declined, we will send you instructions via email to fill our the verification form again. If approved, a ID Verified Badge will be shown on your Profile. If declined, you may provide another form of suitable Photo ID. We aim to process requests within 48 hours.
Cookies
If you visit our login page, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.
When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.
If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.
Affiliate cookies – we run an affiliate program. If you click on a link from one of our affiliate program members that contains their affiliate code, a cookie will track your usage of our site for 30 days.
Analytics cookies – these cookies are used to track the use and performance of our website and services
Advertising cookies – these cookies are used to deliver advertisements that are relevant to you and to your interests. In addition, they are used to limit the number of times you see an advertisement. They are usually placed to the website by advertising networks with the website operator’s permission. These cookies remember that you have visited a website and this information is shared with other organizations such as advertisers. Often targeting or advertising cookies will be linked to site functionality provided by the other organization.
You can remove cookies stored in your computer via your browser settings. Alternatively, you can control some 3rd party cookies by using a privacy enhancement platforms. For more information about cookies, visit allaboutcookies.org.
We use Google Analytics to measure traffic on our website. Google has their own Privacy Policy which you can review here. If you’d like to opt out of tracking by Google Analytics, visit the Google Analytics opt-out page.
Further information and the applicable data protection provisions of Google may be retrieved under https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/ and under http://www.google.com/analytics/terms/us.html.
Google Analytics is further explained under the following Link https://www.google.com/analytics/.
Affiliate Program Participation
The Website may engage in affiliate marketing, which is done by embedding tracking links into the Website. If you click on a link for an affiliate partnership, a cookie will be placed on your browser to track any sales for purposes of commissions.
NZ House Sitters is a participant in the Link Shop Affiliate Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and links to advertisers. As part of this program, the Website will post customized links, provided by Link Shop, to track the referrals to their website. This program utilizes cookies to track visits for the purposes of assigning commission on these sales.
NZ House Sitters is a participant in the CJ Affiliate Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and links to advertisers. As part of this program, the Website will post customized links, provided by CJ Affiliate, to track the referrals to their website. This program utilizes cookies to track visits for the purposes of assigning commission on these sales.
Embedded content from other websites
Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.
These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.
Google Fonts
This website uses Google Fonts. As such, Google logs requests for related CSS and font files.
Recaptcha
We use Google reCAPTCHA V2 (hereinafter “reCAPTCHA”) on our websites. This service is provided by Google Inc., 1600 Amphitheater Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, USA (“Google”). reCAPTCHA is used to check whether the data entered on our website (including contact forms, registration forms and during checkout) has been entered by a human or by an automated program. If you see a green checkmark, congratulations! You’ve passed our robot test (yes, it’s that easy). You can carry on with what you were doing. Sometimes we need some extra info from you to make sure you’re human and not a robot, so we ask you to solve a challenge. Data processing is based on Art. 6 (1) (f) DSGVO. We have a legitimate interest in protecting our site from abusive automated crawling and spam. For more information about Google reCAPTCHA and Google’s privacy policy, please visit the following links: https://policies.google.com/privacy and https://support.google.com/recaptcha/?hl=en
What rights you have over your data
If you have an account on this site, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes. You can request that your user account be deleted; to do so, please contact the site administrator: [email protected]
If you have an account on this Site, you may update your email address, last name, first name/display name at any time. Username are unchangeable.
Corrections: If you believe that any information we hold about you is inaccurate, out of date, incomplete, irrelevant or misleading, please contact us using the details below. We will take reasonable steps to correct any information found to be inaccurate, incomplete, misleading or out of date.
Complaints: If you believe that we have breached the Australian Privacy Principles or an article of the GDPR and wish to make a complaint, please contact us using the details below and provide us with full details of the alleged breach. We will promptly investigate your complaint and respond to you, in writing, setting out the outcome of our investigation and the steps we will take to deal with your complaint. You also have the right to contact the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner if you wish to make a complaint.
Unsubscribe: To unsubscribe from our daily house sitting position email alerts, you can unselect that state from your dashboard, or click on the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email.
Please see the site’s Terms and conditions for more information.
Our responsibilities as a ‘controller’ under the GDPR
Controllers are defined by the GDPR as natural or legal persons, a public authority, agency or other body to which personal information or personal data has been disclosed, whether via a third party or not, and who determines the purposes and means of processing personal information. We are a collector under the GDPR as we collect, use and store your personal information to enable us to provide you with our goods and/or services.
As a collector, we have certain obligations under the GDPR when collecting, storing and using the personal information of EU citizens. If you are an EU citizen, your personal data will:
* be processed lawfully, fairly and in a transparent manner by us;
* only be collected for the specific purposes we have identified in the ‘collection and use of personal information’ clause above and personal information will not be further processed in a manner that is incompatible with the purposes we have identified;
* be collected in a way that is adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary in relation to the purpose for which the personal information is processed;
* be kept up to date, where it is possible and within our control to do so (please let us know if you would like us to correct any of your personal information);
* be kept in a form which permits us to identify you, but only for so long as necessary for the purposes for which the personal data was collected;
* be processed securely and in a way that protects against unauthorised or unlawful processing and against accidental loss, destruction or damage.
We also apply these principles to the way we collect, store and use the personal information of our Australian customers or clients.
Specifically, we have the following measures in place, in accordance with the GDPR:
* Data protection policies: We have internal policies in place which set out where and how we collect personal information, how it is stored and where it goes after we get it, in order to protect your personal information.
* Right to ask us to erase your personal information: You may ask us to erase personal information we hold about you.
* Right to ask us to restrict data processing: You may ask us to limit the processing of your personal information where you believe that the personal information we hold about you is wrong (to give us enough time to verify if the information needs to be changed), or where processing data is unlawful and you request us to restrict the processing of personal information rather than it being erased.
* Maintain Records of Processing Activities: We have automated processes in place to manage transactions and functionality. Unique identifiers are used to ensure privacy of data.
* Notification of data breaches: We will comply with the GDPR in respect of any data breach.
Children
Another part of our priority is adding protection for children while using the internet. We encourage parents and guardians to observe, participate in, and/or monitor and guide their online activity.
We do not knowingly collect any Personal Identifiable Information from children under the age of 18. If you think that someone under the age of 18 has provided this kind of information on our website, we strongly encourage you to contact us immediately and we will do our best efforts to promptly remove such information from our records.
Security and how we protect your data
We take technical and organisations measures to protect your personal information from accidental or unlawful loss, alteration, unauthorized disclosure or access. We use safe protocols for communication and transferring data (such as HTTPS). With the use of TLS (Transport Layer Security), also known as SSL, which is an encryption protocol for safe data transfer on the internet, we can ensure the protection of confidential information. You can recognise the use of this safeguarding tool by the little lock-symbol, which is situated in your browser’s top left corner, as well as by the use of the letters https (instead of http) as a part of our web address.
However, no method of transmission over the Internet or method of electronic storage is 100% secure and thus we cannot guarantee the absolute security of your data transmitted to our site; any transmission is at your own risk. NZ House Sitters endeavours to ensure that the servers used to host the website and data are secure and that once we have received your information, we will use strict procedures and security features to try to prevent unauthorised access. NZ House Sitters cannot guarantee that unauthorised access by third parties will not occur. However, we promise to notify suitable authorities of data breaches. We will also notify you if there is a threat to your rights or interests. We will do everything we reasonably can to prevent security breaches and to assist authorities should any breaches occur. Please note that we do not guarantee the security of the portal or the services or the prevention from loss of, alteration of, or improper access to, your account information or data.
Where we store your data
The data that we collect from you may be transferred to, and stored at, a destination outside of Australia. It may also be processed by staff operating outside of Australia who work for us or for one of our suppliers. Such staff maybe engaged in, among other things, the fulfilment of your order, the processing of your payment details and the provision of support services. By submitting your personal data, you agree to this transfer, storing or processing. We will take all steps reasonably necessary to ensure that your data is treated securely and in accordance with this privacy policy. All information you provide to us is stored on our secure servers. Where we have given you (or where you have chosen) a password which enables you to access certain parts of our site, you are responsible for keeping this password confidential. We ask you not to share a password with anyone in line with our Privacy policy.
Members Account & Dashboard Area
Each individual member account & dashboard area, along with other member private areas such as the Review Manager and My Lists pages are protected by a combination of email address and secret password access.
NZ House Sitters will not ask for members’ passwords at any time. If you are asked for your password by a third party or someone posing as a representative of NZ House Sitters, please do not provide them with this information! Requests of this nature could be an attempt to obtain access to your account area illegally.
Internal Messaging System
Only Members have access to use our internal messaging system. NZ House Sitters will if necessary monitor the communication made between members through its internal messaging system, however this material remains confidential and is not passed on to any third party for any reason except when required by Law.
Linking to our site
It is possible to link to a public profile/ad on NZ House Sitters. If you become aware of someone linking to your page without your consent, please let us know. Any links created to members only pages such as the dashboard will not go through as these areas are password protected. In order to access any of their own password-protected information individual members must login to the site through NZ House Sitters.
Third party links on our site
NZ House Sitters may also contain links to other web sites and advertising. The privacy policies of those web sites and advertisers may significantly differ from that of our Site. It is your responsibility to contact such web site operator or advertiser directly to determine their privacy policy.
What happens to Members information when they don’t renew their Membership?
All personal information of House Sitters(paid membership) and Home Owners (free membership) is kept in our database and will be there for you when you return. If you wish to completely remove all information we have from you, you can request us to delete your account entirely by contacting the Site Administrator: [email protected]
When does this Privacy Policy not apply?
NZ House Sitters may also contain links to other Sites. NZ House Sitters Privacy Policy does not apply once the user has left our Site for another Site. It’s up to Members to check the privacy policy of that Site.
Changes to this Privacy Policy
We may revise this Privacy Policy from time to time. The most current version of the Privacy Policy will govern our collection, use, and disclosure of information about you. By continuing to access or use the Service after those changes become effective, you agree to the revised Privacy Policy.
No Guarantees
While this privacy policy states standards for maintenance of data, and while efforts will be made to meet the said standards, we are not in a position to guarantee compliance with these standards. There may be factors beyond our control that may result in disclosure of data. NZ House Sitters offer no warranties or representations relating to maintenance or non-disclosure of data.
Right to access information
On request by individuals, NZ House Sitters will make known to those individuals the types of personal information it holds, the purpose for which it is held and how NZ House Sitters collects, holds and uses that information.
Right to be forgotten
On request by an individual, but subject to the exceptions prescribed by the National Privacy Principles and any legal requirements, NZ House Sitters will remove any personal details stored within our systems..
Contact us
If you have a concern regarding our privacy policy, you may contact the site administrator at [email protected]