Privacy

No need to disclose personal information

You can use www.employment.govt.nz without disclosing any personal information.

Voluntary disclosure of personal information

You may choose to voluntarily provide personal information through this website (eg in ‘ask a question’, or feedback forms). This information may be viewable by site administrators, MBIE staff (as appropriate) and third-party contractors who may administrate or work on the site.

Electronic alerts and newsletters

When you subscribe to one of our alerts or newsletters, the details you provide may be stored in a secure third-party database (ie Campaign Monitor or Mailchimp). Your name and email address will be used to send you future electronic newsletters, and will not be disclosed without your consent. When you unsubscribe to our alert or newsletter, your details will be deleted from the database.

Collection of personal information

MBIE may ask or require you to provide some personal information when you complete an online form (eg the contact us form). MBIE may require you to register your details with us in order to create or maintain an account or profile (eg Submitting a Record of Settlement to Employment Mediation Services). As part of our online processes there may be other information that is required to be supplied. Failing to provide such information may reduce or make unavailable some services we provide to you. 

We may also ask you to voluntarily provide biographic data. Where you choose to do so, we will use it to understand the customers accessing our services and it may be shared with our team, enabling us to provide better services.

Holding of information

When you provide personal information, it will be held by MBIE. It may be stored or accessed on behalf of MBIE by authorised third parties (such as third-party contractors) to the extent that is necessary, for example for them to administrate or work on the site. We will store and keep your personal information secure in accordance with the Privacy Act 2020 and agents will be subject to the MBIE's information security and privacy requirements. 

Disclosure of information

MBIE will generally not share personal information that is provided or collected through this website, unless it is necessary to do so for the purpose for which you gave us the information (eg to investigate a complaint, or to manage or schedule a mediation) or where you consent. MBIE will not otherwise disclose personal information provided or collected through this website unless required or otherwise permitted by law.

Use of personal information

MBIE will generally only use personal information provided to us through this website for the purpose you provided it (eg to administer, evaluate and improve the site, to improve our services, or to action or respond to the information provided). We may also use personal information provided to us through this website for other reasons permitted under the Privacy Act 2020 (eg with your consent, for a directly related purpose, or where the law permits or requires it).

As part of our commitment to providing the best possible service to our customers, we record all inbound and outbound telephone calls at our contact centre. This helps us to identify ways that we can provide you with a better service.

We record calls for staff training purposes, helping us to improve the quality of our customer service and to ensure the information we provide is consistent and accurate

We understand your personal information is important to you, and we are committed to protecting your privacy. We store the recordings securely for two years and destroy them after this period.

Unless we have lawful reason for withholding this information, it will be made available if you request access to a transcript or copy of your call by emailing the Privacy Officer at oia@mbie.govt.nz.

MBIE will only retain personal information as long as it is required for the purposes for which the information was collected and may lawfully be used.

Public Records

Where any information provided (which may include personal information) to or through this site constitute public records, it will be retained to the extent required by the Public Records Act 2005. MBIE may also be required to disclose information under the Official Information Act 1982 or to a Parliamentary Select Committee or Parliament in response to a Parliamentary Question. The information that we may be required to disclose may contain personal information and may be disclosed without prior notice to you.

Your rights

You have the right to:

• find out from us whether we hold personal information about you
• access that information; and, if applicable
• request corrections to that information

If MBIE has a good reason for refusing a request for correction, you are entitled to request that a statement be attached to the information of the correction that was sought but not made.

If you want to check personal information that we hold, please email oia@mbie.govt.nz or write to:

Privacy Officer
Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment 
PO Box 5488
Wellington 6011
New Zealand

For more information on the privacy laws in New Zealand and contact details for the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, please visit the Privacy Commissioner's website(external link).

Statistical information

We may collect statistical information about your visit to help us improve this site. This information is aggregated and non-personally identifying. It may include:

• your IP address
• the search terms you used
• the pages you accessed on our website and the links you clicked on
• the date and time you visited the site
• the referring site (if any) through which you clicked through to this site
• the device you used to access the site
• your operating system (eg Windows, Mac OSX)
• the type of web browser you use (e.g. Internet Explorer, Chrome); and/or
• other incidental matters such as screen resolution, the release of your installed Flash version and the language setting of your browser.

The statistical information referred to above will be viewable by site administrators and certain other Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment staff. It may also be shared with other government agencies. 

Cookies 

Browser or ‘web’ cookies are small text files that are sent by a website and stored on your computer's hard drive. Cookies are generally used to improve your experience of a website (for example by remembering preferences you have set) and to track site usage.

MBIE use cookies on this website to track individual user journeys. We use cookies to gather data about trends in site usage using a tool called Google Analytics. We also use cookies to gather data about your browsing history on the Employment New Zealand website. We may use this data to enhance your browsing experience, improve our website, identify whether you have seen our marketing material before you visited our site, and target advertising to you.

Google Signals and Google Analytics

This site uses Google Signals as a remarketing and data collection tool. Google Signals only collects data from Google users who have personalised advertising enabled (note: personalised advertising is switched on by default for Google accounts). This data may include browsing history, device and demographic information, as well as search and YouTube history. Google Signals data collection persists across devices.

If you have enabled personalised advertising in your google account, Google will be able to create models and reports about this website's use based in part on your data. These models and reports are based on random samples and are anonymised by Google. This means we cannot identify individual Google users or their actions.

Users can disable personalised advertising in their google account settings or mobile app settings.

Using Google Analytics means that we can advertise to visitors who have visited certain pages on our site. This could be in the form of an advertisement on the Google search results page or a site in the Google Display Network. Third-party vendors such as Google use cookies to serve advertisements based on someone’s past visits to the employment.govt.nz website. Any data collected will be used in accordance with our privacy policy as well as the privacy policies of Google.

Google Privacy Policy(external link)

The types of Advertising Features implemented on the Employment New Zealand website may include:

• Remarketing with Google Analytics
• Google Display Impression Reporting
• DoubleClick Platform integrations
• Google Analytics Demographics and Interest reporting

You can opt-out of remarketing by visiting the following page on Google:

Google – block certain ads(external link)

You can manually disable cookies at any time – check your browser's 'Help' to find out how (disabling cookies will not affect your ability to use this website). 

MBIE websites have security measures in place to prevent the loss, misuse and alteration of information under our control. In order to maintain the cyber security of MBIE systems and information, MBIE systems are subject to ongoing monitoring (including activity logging), analysis and auditing. We may use information about your use of our websites and other IT systems to prevent unauthorised access or attacks on these systems or to resolve such events. We may use this information even if you are not involved in such activity. MBIE may utilise services from one or more third party suppliers to monitor or maintain the cyber security of its systems and information. These third party suppliers will have access to monitoring and logging information as well as information processed on MBIE websites and other IT systems.

Email oia@mbie.govt.nz if you have an enquiry or concern about our privacy policy.