Our Privacy Commitment
Genetic Technologies Limited is the exclusive producer and supplier of Pioneer® brand seed products and inoculant in New Zealand.
To do this we need to collect, store, use and disclose a variety of personal information. Privacy is important to us. Therefore, we are committed to protecting your privacy by keeping your personal information secure.
We are bound by the Information Privacy Principles (IPPs) found in the Privacy Act 2020 (Privacy Act)
Our Privacy Policy
Our Privacy Policy explains how and why we collect, use, hold and disclose your personal information. It applies to all business under the control of Genetic Technologies Limited.
We may need to update this policy in the future. When we do, the updated version will be available on our website (https://www.pioneer.co.nz). It is your responsibility to review this page from time to time.
What personal information do we collect?
The types of personal information we collect depends on your relationship with us. It differs depending on whether you are a shareholder, customer, supplier, employee, job applicant or referee. It may include sensitive information.
Customers: We collect and hold personal information about individuals that may include your name, address, email address, telephone number and the place and type of your business. If we assess your credit application as a customer, we may collect and hold various personal information about you and your financial position, including credit information, credit eligibility information, and credit references (further information concerning our credit arrangements and the collection of your personal information will be provided to you as part of your credit application). For individuals who are existing customers, we may collect and store your payment history.
Suppliers: We collect and hold personal information about individuals that may include your name, address, email address, contact telephone number and information about the goods or services that you supply.
Job Seekers: We collect and hold personal information including your name, address, email address, contact telephone number, gender, age, qualifications, employment history, references and details of referees. We may also collect and store other personal information relevant to your employment application.
Referees: We collect and hold personal information about you if a job seeker uses you as a referee when applying for a position with us. The personal information will include your name, contact details, employment position and professional opinion of the candidate.
Employees: This can include personal information like your name, date of birth, contact details (including address, email address, phone number or mobile telephone number), occupation, driver’s licence number, and financial information (such as your IRD number, bank account number and KiwiSaver or other superannuation fund details).
You might also need to provide personal information about other individuals to us (e.g. about your authorised representatives). If so, you must seek authorisation from that individual for such provision of personal information to us and ensure they are aware of this Privacy Policy.
How do we collect your personal information?
There are four ways that we can collect your personal information.
Directly
- You give it to us when you, or your representatives, interact with us. This may be through simple means such as a visit, telephone call, email, through our company website, an application or a form. It might happen when you set up a customer account with us to buy our products. It may occur when we set you up as a supplier to whom we’ll make payments. It may be when you apply for a job with us, when you start or during your employment with us.
- We collect your personal information via technology. This may be through lawful surveillance means such as the sign in out register at our sites or security alarm systems.
Indirectly
- There may be some instances where personal information about you will be collected indirectly because it is not reasonably practicable in the circumstances to collect personal information directly from you. We collect personal information from our industry networks. This may be from industry organisations, such as our merchant distribution partners and customers. It could be via referrals from other customers, suppliers or employees, with whom you have interacted.
- We obtain personal information from outside sources like credit reports, marketing mailing lists, publicly available information (e.g. from the internet or social media sites) and commercially available information. This can also include personal information gained from our third-party partners if you deal with them. These partners include our commercial partners, credit checking bodies and retail or other customers and suppliers.
We will take reasonable steps to tell you about such collection at or before the time of collection or, if that is not practicable, as soon as practicable after it occurs.
How do we keep your personal information?
We may store your personal information in hard copy or electronic format.
We use reasonable security safeguards to ensure that your personal information is stored safely to protect it from misuse, loss, unauthorised access, modification or disclosure. We use a combination of the latest industry standard technical solutions, security controls and internal processes to help us protect your personal information and our internal network from unauthorised access and disclosure.
How do we use your personal information?
We may use and disclose your personal information for a wide range of purposes including:
Business/Service Management: Your personal information helps us to ensure our business relationship with you is mutually rewarding. For example, we may need your personal details to provide you with our goods and services, to provide you with information about our goods and services, for verification, payment, billing, payroll purposes, and facilitating our internal business operations. We also need to communicate with you to provide you with a high standard of service that meets your needs. Having your up to date contact information helps us enhance this process for both you and us.
Credit account: If you apply for a credit account with us, you authorise us to use and disclose your personal information to conduct a credit assessment of you, to assess your creditworthiness, and to report on your creditworthiness. Further information concerning our credit arrangements and the collection of your personal information will be provided to you as part of your credit application.
Research/Improvement: We’re constantly working to maintain and improve our products and services and to develop new ones. We use the information we collect to help us do this in several ways. For example, to monitor the quality of our hybrid seed sold, analysing trends in the market, and analysing the provision of our goods and services and customer needs. Whenever possible, personal information used for research or improvement purposes is de-identified prior to use. Once your personal information is anonymised, it may no longer be capable of identifying, or being re-linked, to you. In such instances, the protections afforded by certain provisions of the Privacy Act may be limited.
Direct Marketing: We want to make sure that you know about all our products and special offers that are relevant and are of interest to you. So, we may use the personal information we hold to market and promote them directly to you. We will only use or disclose personal information about you for direct marketing purposes if you have consented to that use or disclosure. To opt out of Direct Marketing, see the How to contact us section below.
Recruitment & Selection: We review and retain personal information provided by you within a resume, cover letter or email. We gather this information to assess your job application. We do not retain personal information of unsuccessful job applicants for longer than is necessary. Some examples of personal information collected could include: educational level, qualifications & licensing, work history, experience and referees.
Employee Management: We may review and record personal information about you during your employment with us. This information could be in regard to employee engagement, training, safety hazards/ incidents, team and/or supervisor discussions, performance reviews, investigations and end of employment. We may also use your biometric data for the provision of uniforms or promotional gear.
Compliance: There are several circumstances where we are required to collect, use or disclose employee personal information to comply with New Zealand law. These include collection of personal information for taxation, KiwiSaver and other purposes.
When do we share your personal information?
We use and disclose personal information about you for the purposes for which it was collected (or a purpose that is directly related to the purpose in connection with which the information was obtained). We may disclose your personal information to:
- our employees or contractors, who may access your personal information when there is a legitimate work-related purpose to facilitate our internal business processes;
- our related entities or affiliated organisations, to facilitate our and their internal business processes;
- service providers, who assist us with providing our products and services and operating our business, such as banking and financial services, professional advisors (including legal services), insurance services, and IT services, and these service providers may not be required to comply with our privacy policy;
- specific third parties authorised by you to receive information held by us;
- the police, national security agency, any relevant authority, or enforcement body if required by law or where we reasonably suspect you have been engaged in any unlawful activity and believe that disclosure is necessary;
- third parties where we are permitted or required to do so by law, binding regulation or court order;
- a purchaser of the assets and operations of our business, if those assets and operations are purchased as a going concern; and
- third parties otherwise with your consent.
Each of these third parties are carefully selected, and are only permitted to use your personal information to the extent necessary for them to provide their services to us.
Customers/Suppliers: In addition to the list above, we may share your personal information with additional customers and suppliers such as transport and shipping providers, and, if you have a credit account with us, we may also disclose your personal information to credit reporting bodies, other credit providers, and third parties to whom we assign your debt. Such service providers may not be required to comply with our privacy policy.
Shareholders/Employees: In addition to the list above, we may also disclose your personal information to:
- your authorised representatives or advisers, or others (e.g. your tax agent, bank, or other credit provider) when you ask us to do so;
- the IRD for the purposes of your KiwiSaver contribution;
- a superannuation clearing house, to enable payment to a superannuation fund other than KiwiSaver (if applicable);
- others who assist us in managing or developing our business. For example, as an employee, we may give some of your details to a staff training organisation so you can participate in training activities.
Disclosure of personal information overseas
Our New Zealand business shares resources (including technical resources such as Salesforce) with a related Australian based business that is the exclusive producer and supplier of Pioneer® brand seed products and inoculant in Australia. Personal information may be available to those businesses via those shared resources.
While these related businesses may not be subject to New Zealand privacy laws, we will take such steps as are reasonable in the circumstances to ensure that those organisations are either subject to privacy laws that, overall, provide comparable safeguards to those under the Privacy Act, or are otherwise required to protect personal information in a way that, overall, provides comparable safeguards to those under the Privacy Act. Unless you have authorised us to do so, we will not disclose your personal information to an organisation we do not believe on reasonable grounds is subject to comparable safeguards to those under the Privacy Act.
We are assisted by a variety of external service providers to deliver our services, some of whom may be located overseas. These third parties are too numerous to list, and they change from time to time. Some examples of the types of third parties include:
- technology service providers including cloud, data, and service providers such as Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations located in the US; and
- promotion or marketing service providers, such as Campaign Monitor located in the US.
We transfer personal information to these service providers for processing on our behalf. For the purposes of the Privacy Act, the information is not used by, or disclosed for, the service providers’ own purposes.
Wherever possible, we endeavour to impose contractual restrictions at least equivalent to those imposed on us under the Privacy Act in respect of collection and use of personal information by any third parties. In some cases, such as social media networks and third parties with non-negotiable terms and conditions, our ability to impose contractual restrictions is limited. In those circumstances, we endeavour to carefully consider the risks to the protection of personal information when entering into arrangements with third parties, and in particular, our obligation to notify you where there is a breach of your personal information.
Privacy breaches
If a privacy breach (as defined under the Privacy Act) occurs, we will investigate and assess the breach to determine whether (among other things) we must notify the Privacy Commissioner and the affected individuals in accordance with our obligations under the Privacy Act.
Even if the privacy breach is not “notifiable” under the Privacy Act, we may decide (in our absolute discretion) it is appropriate to notify you.
Third party privacy practices
Our website may contain links to other websites operated by third parties. We make no representations or warranties in relation to the privacy practices of any third party website and we are not responsible for the privacy policies or the content of any third party website. Third party websites are responsible for informing you about their own privacy practices.
Some of our services may be integrated with external services, including social media networks. This may mean that personal information, for instance about your interests and activities, is tracked or pulled from other places (such as Twitter or LinkedIn). If you are signed in to one of our services which is integrated with other media tools, this personal information may be available to others depending on the privacy settings you have in place on other platforms.
How can you access or correct your personal information?
It’s important that you make sure the personal information we hold for you is accurate, up-to-date and complete. You can access the personal information we hold about you, or ask that your personal information be corrected by written request. If any of your details change, or you would like a copy of your personal information held by us, you can contact our Privacy Officer using the details in the How to contact us section below. We can then consider your request and will respond in accordance with the Privacy Act. We may charge you a reasonable fee for costs associated with providing such personal information (but not our time taken to review and process your request).
We may decline a request for access to personal information in circumstances prescribed by the Privacy Act, and if we do, we will give you a written notice that sets out the reasons for the refusal, including details of the mechanisms available to you to make a complaint.
If, upon receiving access to your personal information or at any other time, you believe the personal information we hold about needs correction, please notify us immediately. We will take reasonable steps to correct the information so that it is accurate, up to date, complete and not misleading.
If we refuse to correct your personal information, we will give you a written notice that sets out our reasons for our refusal, including details of the mechanisms available to you to make a complaint. We will also notify you of your entitlement to provide a statement of the correction sought and to request that it be attached to the information (if you have not done so already).
How can you make a privacy complaint?
If you wish to make a complaint about a breach of the Privacy Act or any of our obligations under the IPPs, please lodge your complaint with our Privacy Officer using the contact details found in the How to contact us section, below.
We will acknowledge your complaint in writing as soon as practicable within 7 days. We will aim to investigate and resolve your complaint within 30 days of receiving it. If we need more time, we will notify you about the reasons for the delay and indicate a new estimate time frame.
We hope that we will be able to resolve your complaint without needing to involve third parties. If you are not satisfied with our response, you can lodge a complaint with the New Zealand Privacy Commissioner (www.privacy.org.nz). To lodge a complaint, visit the ‘Your rights’ section of the Privacy Commissioner’s website and click the ‘Making a complaint’ tab, or contact the Privacy Commissioner’s office.
How to contact us
If you have any questions about our Privacy Policy, our management of your personal information, or to lodge a privacy complaint, please contact our Head Office.
Attention: Privacy Officer
Phone: +64 09 307 0000
PO Box: 105303, Auckland City, Auckland 1143, New Zealand
Email: service@genetic.co.nz
OPTING OUT – If you do not wish to receive any future Direct Marketing contact from us, you may opt out through the unsubscribe link found in all direct marketing emails we send.