Rights Aotearoa's Privacy Policy

Rights Aotearoa is New Zealand's leading non-governmental organisation dedicated to promoting, defending, and upholding universal human rights. We work to ensure that all people—particularly those from marginalised communities—can live with dignity, equality, and freedom from discrimination.

We also uphold and defend the unique status of human rights for Māori in Aotearoa that derive from Te Tiriti o Waitangi. 

A core part of our work is challenging hate speech and hate crimes, as the ability to live free from hate is a fundamental human right. We have a strong focus on LGBTQIA+ rights, particularly for transgender, non-binary, and intersex people, but we advocate for all groups affected by human rights violations. 

This Privacy Policy is about how we collect and look after personal information.  We comply with Aotearoa’s Privacy Act.

Rights Aotearoa only collects personal information that we need to do our work.  For donors, we collect personal information such as name, contact details, account details, and amount of payment.  For people who want to access support, we collect relevant personal information for those purposes. We might ask you for some voluntary information – you don’t have to answer any question that is optional. We look after all information by following this policy.

The people who have access to personal information held by us are any member of our team as well as third party support such as IT support or other administration. All of the above people are required to promise us to keep any personal information private and confidential. 

We look after your information in a secure environment, and we take all reasonable steps to prevent loss, unauthorised access, modification or disclosure or other misuse.  Our IT support are required to ensure our IT systems are secure and meet NZ standards of IT security.

Unfortunately, no data transmission over the internet or information stored on servers accessible through the internet can be guaranteed to be fully secure.  If you send us information via email or the internet, or we email or communicate with you via the internet that is at your own risk.

We are committed to privacy security but if there’s a privacy breach of our systems we will investigate and contain the breach where possible.  If we believe that breach has caused or is likely to cause serious harm, we will notify the Office of the Privacy Commissioner and work with the Commissioner to address the breach.  This may include letting affected people know if required. 

We may gather information about visits to our website which includes collecting the name of the domain in which you accessed the internet; the date and time you accessed the website; and the internet address of the website from which you directly linked to the website, usage information, etc).   Most of the time this is anonymous but we may identify you if necessary and we may associate it with other personal information that we collect from you. 

We use “cookies”: small text files placed onto your browser in order to:

·      provide you with information

·      remember information you give us, so you don’t have to re-enter it each time

·      check out the number of people visiting our site and see how they use it.

We collect personal information on our social media channels.  When you follow or like our social media channels or when you like, comment on, share or otherwise interact with any posts or other content on our social media channels, then we collect that information.  This includes your name, profile information, profile picture and anything else you want to tell us.  As with any social media, it is a good idea for you to think about what you post because it is public.  We expect people’s posts to be kind and lawful and if any post is objectionable in any way, we will take it down. 

You always have a right to request access to your personal information and to request correction of your personal information.  You may also opt out of any emails or other contact if you wish – just let us know.

We use information for our purposes: this may mean contacting you for donations or updating you on what is happening in our organisation. 

We may also share personal information if required by law; if necessary to our purposes, to investigate any breach of our policies or terms of use; if you authorise us to do so; if we need to disclose information to prevent harm to you or someone else or in accordance with Aotearoa’s Privacy Act.

We do not disclose personal information out of Aotearoa unless it’s allowed under this policy and only in accordance with Aotearoa’s Privacy Act.

We rely on you to give us information about you that is complete, accurate, up to date, relevant and not misleading. Please let us know if there is any change to your information that we hold.

You can contact us at rights@rightsaotearoa.nz about this policy or to update your information:

Privacy Officer

Rights@rightsaotearoa.nz

(Updated 23 July 2025) (Copyright Rights Aotearoa 2025)