Please read our privacy policy.

We collect personal information about users in order to provide VUWTC members software services and to interact with and respond to club members and interested parties.

Examples of such personal information include information provided when you fill in forms on our website to register to use it, join our events, post material such as trip reports, make payments, hire gear, etc. If you contact us, we may keep a record of that correspondence.

You are encouraged to review and update your personal information, as appropriate, at any time.

In addition, for the purpose of analyzing user trends and internet traffic (see the section about cookies and measuring website traffic below), we may collect details of your visit to our website, information about your computer, Internet Protocol (IP) address, operating system and browser, etc.

We reserve the right to collect any other information at our discretion, and to notify members of news and other important information via email.

Club access

In the case of services provided to club members, for example where you enter emergency details on your profile, create or signup for an event, club administrators and event organisers will have access to your user profile, event sign up information and so on, and additionally may pass this information to the Police / Search and Rescue if warranted. This is essential so that they may respond with the fullest information possible in the event of an emergency.

Request Deletion of Data

To request deletion of your personal data, please email dev@vuwtc.org.nz from the email address associated with the account you wish to delete.

Data storage

We will store your personal information on servers located at approved locations. Data will be stored indefinitely and used for the purposes described in this policy.

Confidentiality and security

We will not disclose your personal information to third parties unless:

  • you authorize us to, or
  • we are required to by law, or
  • we are required to do so to enforce our terms of use or fulfil agreements with third parties that are essential for completing a process (eg payment processing).

We strive to keep users’ personal information as secure as possible. However, as it’s impossible for any exchange of data to be completely secure, all transmissions of data are at users’ own risk.

We offer third party authentication services via Google and Facebook login. If you decide to use these services to sign up or login, we receive and store your email and name from Google or Facebook. We also receive and store your profile image if specifically requested by you when updating your profile on this website.

We have implemented Google’s reCAPTCHA v2 on our site to help protect our services from bots and spam. Our use of reCAPTCHA v2 is subject to Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. We do not use reCAPTCHA for any other purpose.

We use Stripe payment processing for all online card payments. Your card details are not stored on, nor transmitted via this site and are handled entirely over secure channels between Stripe and your browser. You are encouraged to read their privacy policy here and find out more about their security here.

Cookies and measuring website traffic

We use Google Analytics and related tools to analyze how the VUWTC website is used. Google Analytics uses what are known as ‘cookies’: text files placed on users’ computers to collect standard internet log information and visitor behavior information in an anonymous form. Cookie information is transmitted to Google and used to evaluate and to produce statistics about website activity.

We will not use (nor allow third parties to use) such tools to track or collect any Personally Identifiable Information (PII) of visitors to our website. We will not associate any data gathered from our site with any PII from other sources, unless you explicitly submit that information via a fill-in form on our website.

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

The EC issued a formal decision recognizing New Zealand’s legal standards as being sufficient for Article 25(2) of European Union (EU) Directive 95/46/EC: that is that New Zealand’s law provides an “adequate level of data protection”. The shorthand often used is that New Zealand has “EU adequacy” or is “an adequate third country”. While VUWTC 's compliance with New Zealand’s privacy legislation is therefore sufficient, it is expected that New Zealand’s privacy legislation will continue to be developed and align more and more closely with the GDPR. VUWTC will continue to improve its alignment with the principles of both New Zealand legislation and the GDPR.

Links to other sites

In the event that VUWTC provide links to other websites, we take no responsibility for their content or privacy policies. Users are encouraged to read their terms of use and privacy policies before opening any links.

Changes to this policy

We reserve the right to amend this privacy policy at our discretion at any time by displaying an amended version.