Mō te matatapu Privacy statement

This Statement explains how the Natural Hazards Commission Toka Tū Ake (NHC Toka Tū Ake) collects, uses, shares, stores and protects personal information when you use the Natural Hazards Portal (the Portal). We follow the Privacy Act 2020 and its Information Privacy Principles, and in this notice ‘we’, ‘our’ and ‘us’ mean NHC Toka Tū Ake. 

Personal information is information about an identifiable individual. It includes any information that can identify a living person, whether directly (such as name and address) or indirectly (such as through other identifiers).

We are committed to being a trusted kaitiaki (guardian) of the personal information we hold. For more detail about how we collect, use, and share personal information, please see our full Privacy Statementopen_in_new on the Natural Hazards Commission Toka Tū Ake website. 

You can browse the Portal website without providing personal information.  

We collect the personal information we need to carry out our lawful functions under the Natural Hazards Insurance Act 2024. This includes information we need to assess and settle claims, and to support natural hazard preparedness, response, recovery and research. 

Personal information in the Portal may include: 

• property and location details, and  
• details regarding the actual or potential impact of a natural hazard on property

This information is collected through the natural hazard claim process.

When accessing the Natural Hazard Portal, NHC Toka Tū Ake does not collect your personal information.

Information shown in the Portal comes from a range of trusted sources. Claims information is held by the Natural Hazards Commission Toka Tū Ake. Natural hazard maps and other reference data is provided by organisations such as Earth Sciences New Zealand, local government, and Statistics New Zealand.

Visit our Portal data sources page for more detail. 

We may use personal information to carry out our lawful functions, purposes and objectives and to provide, manage, and improve services. 

When sharing this information, we require any third parties protect it and use it only for the purpose we shared it for. 

When we share information, we always:

• check the purpose of sharing and whether the law allows us to share
• share only what is needed, and
• keep it only as long as needed

Where appropriate, other organisations may work on our behalf, or we may give them de‑identified data and analytics to carry out their work independently.

We use physical, technical, and organisational safeguards that fit how sensitive the information is. We keep personal information only as long as we need it to do what we collected it for, or to meet our obligations under the Privacy Act 2020 and Public Records Act 2005. After this, we securely delete it or permanently remove the identifying details.

We may store or process personal information outside New Zealand. When we transfer personal information overseas, we take reasonable steps to make sure it is protected to a standard similar to the standard in the Privacy Act 2020. This may include contract requirements, checks on the provider, and security controls.  

Cookies are small text files placed in your browser to support the Portal functionality and to collect analytics about site use. 

We use analytics tools to collect anonymous usage data (via session cookies) to understand site trends and improve performance. 

We use analytics to improve site performance, support site administration and generate usage statistics so that we can improve the website. We:

• do not link analytics data to personal information held by us
• do not use it to identify individuals
• limit its use to aggregated reporting (grouped data)

Analytics data (including IP addresses) may be stored or processed outside New Zealand.

You can manage cookies through your browser settings or cookie controls. However, disabling cookies may affect how the Portal functions.