Your information stays yours
What OwnBetter collects, why, and who can see it. Nothing about you is shared with a retailer, insurer, adviser or trade until you ask for offers and see exactly what is included.
Who we are
OwnBetter Limited ("OwnBetter", "we") runs ownbetter.co.nz. We are a New Zealand company and we handle personal information under the Privacy Act 2020 and its Information Privacy Principles.
Questions, requests and complaints about privacy go to our privacy officer at support@ownbetter.co.nz.
What we collect
Only what the product needs to work for you:
- Your account — email address, name and password. Passwords are held by our sign-in provider, never by us in readable form.
- Your properties — the properties you confirm as yours, and anything you add about them: occupancy, notes, photos and 3D scans.
- Your bills and documents — bills, invoices, policy schedules and other files you upload, and the details read from them.
- Your services — electricity and gas ICP numbers, internet connections, insurance policies, loans and the accounts they sit under.
- People you work with — contacts you add, and the tradespeople, advisers and suppliers you deal with through us.
- Payments — what you ordered and whether it was paid. Card details are handled by Stripe and never reach us.
- How the site is used — our servers log each request they answer: your IP address, your browser's description of itself (the user agent), the time and the page. These logs are kept for a limited time to run the service, find faults and stop abuse, and are not used to build a profile of you.
- Visits to property pages — when you open a property's page we record the visit: when it was, a random visitor number kept in a cookie, your IP address and user agent, the kind of device, the site you came from (its name only, never the full link), and your account if you are signed in. The property's owner and its listing agent see only counts of visits, never who visited. Our staff can see the detail to deal with abuse and bots. Your IP address and user agent are deleted from these records after 90 days.
Public register information
To find the properties that are yours, we match against public registers — most importantly Land Information New Zealand's record of titles and their registered owners. Owner names from those registers are personal information, supplied to us under LINZ's licence for personal data.
We treat them accordingly: owner names are not shown on public property pages, are kept out of search engines, and are only shown to a signed-in person in the course of confirming their own properties. If you would like your name removed from what we hold, write to support@ownbetter.co.nz and we will delete it.
How we use it
- To show you your properties, what they cost to run, and what is coming up.
- To compare your plans, rates and policies against the market.
- To send the requests you choose to make — for quotes, offers or reports — and the replies to them.
- To send account email: sign-in codes, receipts, and reminders you have asked for.
- To keep the service secure, fix faults, and meet our legal obligations.
We do not sell personal information, and we do not use it for advertising.
Reading your documents
When you upload a bill, policy or other document, we use an AI model to read it and fill in the details for you — the supplier, the amounts, the dates, what a policy covers. The model runs on Amazon Web Services under our account. Your documents are not used to train it, and you can correct anything it reads.
Where it is kept
Your information is stored with Amazon Web Services, in New Zealand where the service is available. Some of the companies above process information overseas — Stripe and Postmark in the United States, for example — and some processing, such as reading documents, may take place in Australia. Where that happens we rely on those providers' contractual and legal protections being comparable to New Zealand's.
We keep your information while your account is open. When you close it, we delete it straight away: your account details, every portfolio only you own and everything in it — properties, loans, bills, contacts, policies, photos and documents — and you are removed from any portfolio someone else shared with you.
A few records outlive an account because the law or another person's rights require it, and we keep them with your name and contact details removed: paid orders (tax law requires business records to be kept for seven years), requests for offers that a supplier paid to respond to (the payment is the supplier's record), commission on an energy switch, and support requests about a property claim. Payment card records are held by Stripe under its own retention rules.
Identity documents. If you ask to be verified as the owner of a property, you send us a photo or scan of your driver's licence or passport, and any papers you choose to add, such as a rates notice or settlement statement. They are stored privately, seen only by our staff to compare the name on them with the title, and never shown on the site or passed to anyone else. We delete the files 30 days after we decide your request, and keep only the decision and which kind of document we saw.
Your rights
You can, at any time and at no cost:
- get a copy of the personal information we hold about you — press Download my data on your profile for an immediate copy of your account and every portfolio you own, as one file;
- correct it — most of it where it is shown, or by asking us;
- delete your account and what is in it — press Close my account on your profile and confirm with your email address. It happens straight away and cannot be undone, so download your data first if you want a copy.
You can also write to support@ownbetter.co.nz for any of these, or about information we hold on you without an account (such as an owner name from a public register). We will answer within 20 working days. If you are not satisfied with our answer, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner at privacy.org.nz.
Changes and contact
If we change this policy in a way that matters, we will tell you by email or in the app before the change takes effect. The date at the top of this page shows when it last changed.
Privacy officer: support@ownbetter.co.nz