Personal Information
The information that Telnet Services Limited (“Telnet”) collects from you is held in accordance with the Privacy Act 1993 and in particular, the Privacy Principles contained in that Act. Telnet may collect your personal information in a variety of ways when you request or use our products or services, including via surveys, information or feedback you’ve provided to us (including live chats, posts on our blogs and social media sites), information gathered through cookies used in accordance with our Internet access terms and conditions, emails, faxes, recordings of customer service interactions, credit control, sales and other telephone calls, or via any other communication we may have had with you. This includes personal information we gather on behalf of our clients during the provision of our services to them. Note that we generally record both inbound and outbound calls for operational and training purposes.
Telnet may use any personal information we collect for the following purposes:
- delivering services on behalf of our clients;
- confirming your identity and the identity of others authorised on your account;
- administering your account (including billing you) and managing our relationship with you;
- supplying you services you have requested;
- carrying out credit checks and credit scoring, debt collection (including the sale of debt to third party collection agencies), and the provision of credit information to credit agencies (which may be provided by credit agencies to its customers);
- disclosing your positive credit information including monthly repayment history to credit reporters;
- improving our customer service, including monitoring, assessing and following up queries and complaints;
- improving our website and social media pages;
- developing or improving our products and/or services;
- informing you or contacting you regarding our products, services, publications and other promotions we think you may be interested in (including by text message where we have obtained your mobile phone number);
- commissioning a market research company to carry out a study on our behalf;
- carrying out our responsibilities, including complying with any requirements and any lawful requests in accordance with statute, or industry rules and regulations; and
- enforcing our rights under our contracts with our clients.
It is important that your information is up to date. Please tell us if any of your contact details or other information you’ve given us changes.
Security of your information
Telnet takes all reasonable steps to ensure that all information we collect, use or disclose is accurate and stored in a secure environment accessed only by authorised persons for legitimate business purposes. We regularly train our staff on their responsibilities under the Privacy Act and the terms of this policy. We may store and process your information using services provided by a third-party provider, including cloud-based providers located in New Zealand, Australia, the United States, Singapore and Japan. When we send your information overseas, we take all reasonable steps to ensure that appropriate information handling and security arrangements are in place and/or contractual arrangements exist that place appropriate information handling and security obligations on the recipients or holders of the information. Please note that New Zealand law may not apply to some of these third-party providers.
Disclosure of your information
Telnet will not disclose, sell, distribute or share your personal information with third parties, except in accordance with the strict exceptions contained in the Privacy Act, or where authorisation has been given by you for that disclosure. In order to fulfil the purposes listed above, Telnet may disclose your information to (but not limited to) the following:
- debt collection agencies and credit risk assessment agencies (credit reporters) who may share your information with other organisations, and who may keep a record of the searches we make against your name;
- our legal, financial and other professional service advisors; and
- our related companies, as that term is defined in the Companies Act 1993.
Where Telnet discloses your personal information to third parties for the above purposes, this will be on a strictly confidential basis.
Access to your information
You may request an inspection, update or correction of the personal information Telnet Services holds about you by putting the request in writing addressed to the Privacy Officer at:
Postal Address:
Telnet Services Limited
PO Box 4313
Shortland Street
Auckland 1140
Email: privacy@telnet.nz
Facsimile: (09) 303 5300
We will take steps to check the identity of the person making any such request. We will provide you with access to your information where it is stored in such a way that it can be readily retrieved.
How do you make a privacy complaint?
If you have a complaint about the privacy of the information we hold about you, please contact our Privacy Officer at the details listed above. We will try to resolve your complaint straight away. If it is complex, or involves other parties, we will investigate it for you. In any event, we will acknowledge your complaint in writing within two business days of receipt. If you are not satisfied with the way we’ve handled your complaint and your concerns are unresolved following completion of our internal process, you can refer your concern to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner (see www.privacy.org.nz for further information about their complaints process).
Changes to this policy
Telnet reserves the right to update this Privacy Policy from time to time. Any change we make applies from the date the updated Privacy Policy is posted on our website.
