Privacy policy

Who we are

Hawke's Bay News is an independent, locally owned news platform reporting on Napier, Hastings and the wider Hawke’s Bay region. This policy covers our website and our mobile apps. If you have a question about anything here, email editor@hawkesbaynews.co.nz.

Reading the website

You can read every story on this site without giving us anything. There is no sign up, no newsletter wall and no reader account, so there is no profile of you for us to keep.

We do not use tracking cookies, and we do not run third-party advertising networks or social media tracking pixels. Like any website, our hosting provider records standard technical information when a page is served — including your IP address, the page requested, the time, and your browser and device type. That is used to serve the site, keep it secure and diagnose faults. It is not used to identify you as a reader or to target advertising.

Notifications in the app

If you turn on breaking news alerts, your device is issued a notification token by Apple or Google, and we store it so we can send you an alert. Alongside it we store whether the device is iOS or Android, whether alerts are currently switched on, and when the app last checked in.

A notification token identifies a device, not a person. We do not link it to your name, your email address or the stories you read, because we hold none of those things.

You can turn alerts off at any time in the app’s Settings screen, or in your phone’s own notification settings. Turning them off marks the device as opted out rather than deleting the record, so that turning them back on doesn’t require your phone to issue a new token. If you would rather the record was deleted outright, email us and we will delete it.

Advertising

We sell advertising space directly to local businesses. We do not use an advertising network, so no third party is given space on our pages to observe you.

We count how many times each advertisement is shown and how many times it is clicked, so we can tell the advertiser how their campaign performed. Those are running totals against the advertisement, not against you: there is no identifier, no cookie and no record of who clicked. Clicking an advertisement takes you to the advertiser’s own website, where their privacy policy applies rather than ours.

Embedded video

Some stories include a YouTube video. Until you tap play we show only a still image, so YouTube is not loaded and sets nothing on your device. When you do tap play we load the video through YouTube’s privacy-enhanced player, which does not set tracking cookies for viewing. Once the player loads, Google’s own terms and privacy policy apply to your use of it.

Emailing us

Our news tip and advertising links open your own email app — there is no form and nothing is submitted through this website. If you email us we keep that email, and any information in it, for as long as we need it to deal with what you sent.

Cookies

We set no cookies for readers. The only cookies this site sets are the sign-in cookies for our own staff publishing system, which are set when a member of our team logs in and are strictly necessary for that to work.

Who else handles your information

We use a small number of service providers to run the site and the apps. They act on our instructions and are not permitted to use your information for their own purposes.

• Vercel — serves the website and keeps short-term technical logs.
• Supabase — our database and image storage, hosted in Sydney, Australia.
• Expo — delivers notifications to our apps.
• Apple and Google — operate the notification services that deliver an alert to your phone, and the app stores the apps are distributed through.

Some of these providers are based overseas, which means information may be stored or processed outside New Zealand. We only use providers we consider to have appropriate safeguards in place.

How long we keep things

We keep a notification token for as long as the app is installed and the device keeps checking in. If a device stops responding, or the notification service tells us the token is no longer valid, we mark it inactive and remove it in due course. Technical logs are short-lived and are kept only as long as they are useful for security and fault-finding. Emails are kept for as long as we need them for the matter they relate to.

Keeping it secure

Information is held in access-controlled systems, encrypted in transit, and reachable only by the people who need it. No system is perfectly secure, but we do not hold the kind of information — names, addresses, payment details, reading history — that would make us a worthwhile target.

Your rights

The Privacy Act 2020 gives you the right to ask what personal information we hold about you, to ask us to correct it, and to complain if you think we have got it wrong. Email us and we will respond as quickly as we can, and within the timeframes the Act requires.

In practice, the only personal information we are likely to hold about a reader is a notification token, and the quickest way to have it removed is to turn alerts off in the app.

If you are not satisfied with how we have handled a privacy issue, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner at privacy.org.nz.

Children

This is a general news service. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them.

Changes to this policy

If we change how we handle information — for example if we start measuring readership — we will update this page and change the date at the top of it.