Privacy Policy

Privacy policy

INTRODUCTION

This page Hitch Limited (we, us, our) complies with the New Zealand Privacy Act 2020 (the Act) when dealing with personal information. Personal information is information about an identifiable individual (a natural person).

This policy sets out how we will collect, use, disclose and protect your personal information.

This policy does not limit or exclude any of your rights under the Act. If you wish to seek further information on the Act, see www.privacy.org.nz.

If you have any questions or concerns regarding this policy, please contact us at claudia@hitcharide.co.nz.

CHANGES TO THIS POLICY

We may change this policy by uploading a revised policy onto our website, so please review it frequently. The change will apply from the date we upload the revised policy. If we make material changes to this policy, we will notify you by email.

This policy was last updated on 11 April 2022.

WHO DO WE COLLECT YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION FROM

We collect personal information about you from:

you, when you provide that personal information to us, including via our website or the Accelerate App, any related service, through any registration or subscription process, through any contact with us (e.g. telephone call or email), or when you or your employer or place of study buys or uses our services;
third parties where you have authorised this or the information is publicly available.

If possible, we will collect personal information from you directly.

WHAT INFORMATION DO WE COLLECT

Depending on which service you use, we collect different kinds of personal information from or about you, including:

Personal information (e.g. name, demographic, job)
Contact information
Commuting habits, preferences, barriers and motivations
Drivers license (photos)
Information about your vehicle
Your use of Hitch or Accelerate (e.g. number of times you have used either platform, your type of use, impact made)
Your experience with Hitch or Accelerate
Interactions with us (e.g. records of communications with us)

Why do we collect this information?

Hitch has three service offerings:

Workplace and tertiary education carpooling programme
Workplace and tertiary education commuter analysis
Hitch Accelerate

Although at times, your workplace or place of study may be the purchaser of Hitch services, your use and decision to provide personal information is entirely voluntary. Providing us with your personal information is entirely voluntary, however we need this in order to provide our services to you and your workplace or place of study (if applicable). This could include:

Finding carpooling, walking, running or cycling matches for you and connecting you for carpooling
Providing reporting back to your workplace
Accurately accounting for your commuting carbon emissions in our workplace commuter analysis report
Providing leaderboards ranking commuting behaviour against teams, individuals and workplaces
Running competitions and recording your commuting behaviour in Hitch Accelerate
Any other service we provide

We also collect information about your use of our Hitch and Accelerate. This is needed to provide reporting back to your employer or place of study on their employees' or students' use and impact made with Hitch. It may also include sharing anonymised views of the data with our partners.

We also collect some information to monitor website use, however this is not sensitive and is anonymised.

HOW WE USE YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION

We are passionate about providing the best possible experience for you. We use the information we have to help us provide support and improve our products and services. This includes:

Providing, iterating and developing our products, specifically;

to determine interest for coordinated carpooling
to match people for coordinated carpooling
to contact you about carpooling matches
to verify your identity
to check your license is up to date and valid
to check your car is currently registered and warranted
to provide services and products to you
to see how you interact with us
to keep a record of rides that have taken place
integrate the anonymised findings into future products
where applicable to provide your employer or place of study with information on employee commuting habits (workplace carpooling and commuting carbon reporting product only)
where applicable to provide your employer or place of study with information about commuting opportunities (workplace and tertiary education carpooling and commuting carbon reporting product only)
where applicable to provide your employer or place of study with information on their employees use of, experience and impact made with Hitch (workplace and tertiary education carpooling and commuting carbon reporting product only)
where applicable to provide your employer or place of study with your car registration number to give you access to preferential parking (workplace and tertiary education carpooling only)
track and share with our partners anonymised trends and metrics overtime
to conduct research and statistical analysis (on an anonymised basis)
to display leaderboards and competitions through Accelerate
to show colleagues your suburb so you and they can search for carpooling, walking, running and cycling buddies (opt in only)
to allow you to connect via in app messaging with other colleagues to walk, run, cycle or carpool to work with

Communicate with you, including;

contact you about Hitch products we think might be of interest to you and participation in future Hitch surveys
to respond to you if you contact us and monitor and resolve any issues (including a complaint)
to market our services and products to you, including contacting you electronically (e.g. by text or email for this purpose)

Other, including;

to protect and/or enforce our legal rights and interests, including defending any claim
for any other purpose authorised by you or the Act.

DISCLOSING YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION

We will keep your personal information we hold confidential, but may provide such information to:

persons under a duty of confidentiality to us, such as our employees, contractors, and any other third party service providers to the extent necessary to provide the services to you;
any of our affiliates, business partners and counterparts (if any);
other third parties (for anonymised statistical information);
your employer or place of study to provide our services e.g. for reporting on your use of, and impact made with Hitch, or reporting on commuting carbon emissions
a person who can require us to supply your personal information (e.g. a regulatory authority);
any other person authorised by the Act or another law (e.g. a law enforcement agency); or
any other person authorised by you.

We use Wix.com and Google Workspace to collect, store and process your information and Stripe to facilitate any payments.

Our Accelerate app is hosted through Adalo and made available through Apple App Store and Google Play Store.

A business that supports our services may be located outside New Zealand. This may mean your personal information is held and processed outside New Zealand and your information may not be given the same level of protection provided by the New Zealand Privacy Act.

PROTECTING YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION

We will take reasonable steps to keep your personal information safe from loss, unauthorised activity, or other misuse.

If your information is disclosed to an unauthorised party, lost or misused and we believe this has or could cause harm, we will notify the privacy commissioner and you as soon as reasonably possible.

DATA STORAGE, RETENTION AND DELETION

Our website provider is Wix. Wix may collect, store and process certain Personal Information of our users, solely on our behalf and direction. For example, we are able to import our e-mail contacts from third-party services like Gmail, or otherwise collect and manage contacts via Hitch Limited. Such contacts are then stored with Wix, on our behalf.

For such purposes, Wix serves and shall be considered as a “Processor” and not as the “Controller” (as both such capitalized terms are defined in the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”)) of such Users-of-Users Information.

If Wix is requested by Hitch Limited to remove any of your Personal Information, they will respond to such requests in a timely manner upon verification and in accordance with applicable law (for example, thirty (30) days under the GDPR).

By agreeing to this privacy policy, you are also agreeing to Wix’s, Stripes and Google Workspaces privacy policy.

Hitch will retain your information and data only as long as necessary for the purposes highlighted above.

Our Accelerate app is hosted through Adalo. Adalo may collect, store and process certain Personal Information of our users, solely on our behalf and direction. For example, we are able to import our e-mail contacts from third-party services like Gmail, or otherwise collect and manage contacts via Hitch Limited. Such contacts are then stored with Adalo, on our behalf.

For such purposes, Adalo serves and shall be considered as a “Processor” and not as the “Controller” (as both such capitalized terms are defined in the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”)) of such Users-of-Users Information.

If Adalo is requested by Hitch Limited to remove any of your Personal Information, they will respond to such requests in a timely manner upon verification and in accordance with applicable law (for example, thirty (30) days under the GDPR).

By agreeing to this privacy policy, you are also agreeing to Wix’s, Adalo, Google Play Store, Apple App Store, Stripe and Google Workspaces privacy policy.

Hitch will retain your information and data only as long as necessary for the purposes highlighted above.

ACCESSING AND CORRECTING YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION

Subject to certain grounds for refusal set out in the Act, you have the right to access your readily retrievable personal information that we hold and to request a correction to your personal information. Before you exercise this right, we will need evidence to confirm that you are the individual to whom the personal information relates.

In respect of a request for correction, if we think the correction is reasonable and we are reasonably able to change the personal information, we will make the correction. If we do not make the correction, we will take reasonable steps to note on the personal information that you requested the correction.

If you want to exercise either of the above rights, email us at claudia@hitcharide.co.nz. Your email should provide evidence of who you are and set out the details of your request (e.g. the personal information, or the correction, that you are requesting).

We may charge you our reasonable costs of providing to you copies of your personal information or correcting that information.

INTERNET USE

While we take reasonable steps to maintain secure internet connections, if you provide us with personal information over the internet, the provision of that information is at your own risk.

If you follow a link on our website to another site, the owner of that site will have its own privacy policy relating to your personal information. We suggest you review that site’s privacy policy before you provide personal information.

We use cookies (an alphanumeric identifier that we transfer to your computer’s hard drive so that we can recognise your browser) to monitor your use of the website. You may disable cookies by changing the settings on your browser, although this may mean that you cannot use all of the features of the website.

CONTACTING YOU

We may contact you via the contact details that you provide in registering your interest via the registration form on our website.

Providing some information is optional. If you choose not to enter any of this information, we'll be unable to provide you with more information about carpooling.

CONTACTING US

If you have any questions about this privacy policy, our privacy practices, or if you would like to request access to, or correction of, your personal information, you can contact us at claudia@hitcharide.co.nz.

Privacy policy

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