Privacy Policy

1. What personal information we collect

The personal information we collect includes:

• Account details — your name, username, registered email address, contact email address and contact phone number.
• Organisation details — your company or client name, address, phone number and email address.
• Project information — the site address or map coordinates, project title, your own reference, and the scope you select.
• Property owner details — where you supply them, the owner’s name, email address, phone number and address.
• Documents you upload — geotechnical reports, architectural plans, truss and loading plans, site surveys and other supporting material, which may themselves contain personal information about you or others.
• Correspondence — comments you post against a project, and emails or other communications with us.
• Payment information — the amount, date and a transaction reference. We do not receive or store your full card number.

If you choose not to provide the information we ask for, we may be unable to respond to your enquiry, provide the services you have requested, or consider you for employment.

2. How we collect personal information

We collect personal information directly from you wherever possible — when you register an account, submit or edit a project, upload documents, post a comment, or contact us by email or phone.

We may also receive personal information about you from third parties, such as your architect, designer, surveyor, geotechnical engineer, builder or Building Consent Authority, where they are involved in your project.

3. Information you give us about other people

When you use our services you may give us personal information about people other than yourself — for example, the property owner, your colleagues, or the architect, designer, surveyor, builder or other consultants named in your project or in the documents you upload.

Before you give us another person’s personal information, you must:

• make sure you are entitled to share it with us for the purposes of your project;
• tell that person that you are sharing their details with Foenix Limited, and why; and
• point them to this Privacy Policy, so they know how we will use their information and how they can access or correct it.

By supplying another person’s personal information, you confirm that you have done this.

We use that information only for the project it was supplied for, and handle it in accordance with this policy. If your details have been given to us by someone else, you have the same rights as anyone else to access and correct them — see clause 11.

4. How we use your personal information

We use personal information to:

• create and administer your account and your organisation;
• prepare, check and issue engineering designs, calculations, drawings and producer statements for your project;
• communicate with you about a project, including requests for information;
• process payments and maintain financial records;
• meet our professional, insurance, statutory and record-keeping obligations;
• improve our services and this website;
• respond to enquiries, and consider applicants for employment.

We do not use your project documents for any purpose other than delivering and supporting your project, and meeting the obligations above.

5. Disclosure of personal information

We do not sell, rent or trade your personal information. We may disclose it to:

• other people in your organisation who hold an account with us — see clause 7;
• Building Consent Authorities and other regulators, where required to progress or support a consent application;
• other consultants engaged on your project, where necessary and with your knowledge;
• our service providers, who process information on our behalf — our payment provider (card processing), our cloud storage provider (project files), and our hosting and email providers;
• our professional advisers and insurers, where reasonably necessary;
• any person where required or authorised by law.

Some of these providers store information outside New Zealand. Where that is the case we take reasonable steps to ensure comparable safeguards are in place, as required by Information Privacy Principle 12 of the Privacy Act 2020.

6. Information collected via our website

We use a strictly necessary cookie to keep you signed in. It contains a signed session identifier, not your password, and is removed when you sign out or when it expires.

A separate preference is stored in your browser to remember whether you chose the light or dark theme. It contains no personal information.

Our servers may record technical information such as IP address, browser type and pages requested, for security and diagnostic purposes.

Where you locate a site by dropping a pin on the map, the map imagery is served by a third-party map provider and the coordinates you select are stored against your project. We do not track your device location; the “use my location” option only runs if you choose it and grant your browser’s permission.

7. Visibility within your organisation

Our service is designed for teams. Every account belongs to an organisation, and all users in an organisation can see every project belonging to it — including project and owner details, uploaded documents, comments, and the history of who did what and when.

Anyone who registers using your organisation’s join code gains that access. Please share the code only with people you intend to give it to, and contact us if someone should be removed.

8. Storage and security of personal information

We take reasonable steps to protect personal information from loss, misuse and unauthorised access, disclosure or alteration. Passwords are stored only as a cryptographic hash and cannot be read by us or recovered. Access to project information is restricted to your own organisation and to our staff who need it.

Uploaded documents are held in access-controlled storage and are released only to a signed-in user whose organisation owns the project. No security measure is perfect, and we cannot guarantee absolute security, but we will notify you and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of any notifiable privacy breach as required by the Privacy Act 2020.

9. Email security

Emails sent to us are scanned for security purposes. Our IT administrators may access emails to authorise content for security purposes, and not thereafter. Email is not a secure medium; please upload sensitive project material through your account rather than sending it by email.

10. Retention of personal information

We retain personal information only for as long as reasonably necessary for the purposes it was collected, or as required by law. Project records, designs and supporting documentation are retained for at least the period during which a claim may be brought in relation to building work, and to meet our professional and insurance obligations.

When we no longer need personal information, we take reasonable steps to securely de-identify or dispose of it.

11. Accessing and correcting your personal information

Under the Privacy Act 2020 you have the right to ask for access to the personal information we hold about you, and to ask us to correct it if it is wrong. You can review and update much of your own information from your account at any time.

To make a request, contact our Privacy Officer at info@foenix.co.nz. We may need to verify your identity. We will respond within 20 working days. If we decline a request we will tell you why, and you may complain to the Privacy Commissioner.

12. Changes to this policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect changes in law or in our business practices. The current version will always be published on this website. We encourage you to review it periodically.

13. Links to third-party websites

Our website may contain links to third-party websites. We are not responsible for the privacy practices of those websites and encourage you to review their privacy policies separately.

This policy should be read together with our Terms and Conditions.

14. Complaints and contact

If you have a question or concern about how we handle personal information, please contact our Privacy Officer in the first instance. We take complaints seriously and will investigate and respond to you.

If you are not satisfied with our response, you may complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner at privacy.org.nz, or by phoning 0800 803 909.