Privacy policy.

The short version.

Carfinance.org.nz is a calculator and information site. There are no application forms on this domain, nothing here asks for your name or contact details, and we do not sell or share personal information with anyone.

What we do keep is a record of which pages get visited and which apply buttons get clicked. Those click records include a one-way hash of your IP address, your browser's user-agent string, the page you came from, your country, and the loan figures the calculator was showing at the time. We cannot put a name to any of that, and we do not try to, but it is not anonymous either. The rest of this page sets out what that means.

Who we are.

Carfinance.org.nz is operated from New Zealand as an information and calculator service. We are not a lender, not a registered financial adviser, and not a broker. This Privacy Policy is issued under the Privacy Act 2020 and sets out how we treat personal information collected through our site.

What we collect.

Four things, and it is worth separating them because they are not equally revealing.

1. Page view counts

Every page you open sends one record to our own database. It holds the page path, the date, and whether this was the first time that page had been opened in your browser tab. Nothing else. There is no identifier in it, so these are counts and cannot be traced back to a person or joined to anything below.

2. Apply-button clicks

This is the detailed one. When you click an "Apply" or "Get a rate" button, we write one row recording:

• The page you clicked from, which button on it, and the time.
• A one-way hash of your IP address, produced by combining it with a secret value only we hold. We never store the address itself.
• A session identifier, derived from the same hash plus your user agent and the date, so repeat clicks on the same day can be recognised as one visit.
• Your browser's user-agent string, the page that referred you, and the two-letter country code Cloudflare reports.
• The loan amount, deposit, interest rate and term the calculator was showing when you clicked.

We call the IP hash pseudonymised rather than anonymous, and the distinction matters. A hash is one-way, so it cannot be turned back into an address by reading it. But the pool of possible IP addresses is small enough that anyone holding our secret value could work through it, so we treat these rows as personal information under the Privacy Act 2020 and apply the rest of this policy to them accordingly.

3. Google Analytics

Page views, referrer URLs, device type, and events when you use the calculator or click an apply button, sent to Google Analytics 4. The event payload carries the campaign name, whether a partner was live, and the four calculator numbers. It carries nothing that identifies you. Google Analytics 4 does not log or store IP addresses; it uses them briefly for coarse geolocation and discards them, and it offers no IP-anonymisation setting because it does not need one.

4. Sign-in details, for staff and partners only

There is a private administration area for the people who run this site and for our finance partner. Signing in there involves an email address, and we store that address, a hash of the one-time code sent to it, an IP hash, and a user agent. This applies to nobody visiting the public site. Ordinary use of the calculator never touches it.

None of this involves a form. Nothing on the public site asks for your name, email, phone number, address, income, or identification, and none of those things are stored. If you click through to Simplify and start an application on their site, anything you enter there is governed by their privacy policy, not ours.

How long we keep it.

• Click records: 24 months. Long enough to compare a season against the same season a year earlier, which is the longest question our partner reporting asks. Deleted automatically after that.
• Sign-in attempt records: 90 days. Kept so we can investigate an attempt to break into the administration area, and no longer.
• Sign-in codes: 7 days. They are single-use and expire within minutes; the row is deleted the following week.
• Expired sessions: 30 days.
• Page view counts: indefinitely. They contain no identifier and cannot be connected to a person, and they are the only long-run record we have of which pages are useful.

Deletion is automatic rather than something we remember to do. Google holds its own analytics data under Google's retention settings, which are separate from ours.

Cookies and similar technology.

Google Analytics sets cookies in your browser to recognise returning visitors and measure aggregate usage. You can disable these cookies in your browser settings or via browser-level tracking protection without affecting your ability to use the calculator. We do not use advertising cookies, retargeting pixels, or cross-site tracking scripts.

Third parties.

Three third parties touch your visit:

• Cloudflare, Inc. This site is hosted on Cloudflare, so every request you make passes through their network and our database sits on their infrastructure. They process that traffic on our behalf and are bound by their own data-processing terms. Cloudflare is also where the country code on a click record comes from.
• Google Analytics 4 (Google LLC). Collects the usage data described above. Governed by Google's privacy terms.
• Our finance partner. Simplify (simplify.co.nz). When you click an apply button, your browser leaves this site and opens their application on their own domain. From that point you are on their site, under their privacy policy and their Credit Contracts and Consumer Finance Act obligations. We send them no information about you; all they receive is a visitor arriving from a link.

Your rights under the Privacy Act.

You have the right to ask what we hold about you and to have it corrected. Email the address below and we will respond within 20 working days.

One thing is worth saying plainly, because it affects what we can actually give you. We hold no name, email address or account for anyone using the public site, so we have no way to look you up. A click record is keyed to a hash of an IP address, and finding yours would mean you telling us the address you were using and roughly when, and us hashing it to match. That is possible, and we will do it on request. It is not possible for us to do it without your help, and we would rather say so here than after you have written to us.

If you are not satisfied with our response, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner at privacy.org.nz.

Changes to this policy.

If we change how we handle information (for example, adding a new analytics tool, or naming the finance partner), we will update this page and change the "Last updated" date at the top. The date is the record. This page previously promised a homepage banner for material changes as well, which was a commitment nothing on the site could deliver, so it has been removed rather than left standing.

Contact.

Privacy queries, data-access requests, or complaints: privacy@carfinance.org.nz.