We collect personal information from you, including information about your:

• name
• contact information (including email address)
• interactions with us
• usage of our Website
• Community Contributions (i.e. any archives, stories, recollections, comments, files, data or other material posted on or uploaded to the Website by the public, including you).
   

We permit registered users to login and make Community Contributions.  You may be asked to provide some personal information (which we collect) related to your Community Contribution before you can submit it on the Website.   If you include personal information within your Community Contribution itself, we will also collect this information.
 

We collect your personal information in order to:

• register you on our Website and provide you with a login
• send our registered users communications related to our Website and heritage collections (you can unsubscribe from these list-serve communications at any time)
• communicate with you relating to your use of our Website
• obtain information from you about a Community Contribution you are making
• contact you about a Community Contribution you have made
• moderate and make publicly available Community Contributions on our Website
• record and make publicly available information (including Community Contributions, copyright and licensing status, stories, recollections, research and metadata) about heritage items on our Website
   

You authorise us to email you for these purposes using the email address you have provided.
 

We may also collect technical information whenever you log on to, or visit the public version of, our Website.  This may include information about the way users arrive at, browse through and interact with our Website.  We may collect this type of technical information by using cookies and other means.  Cookies are alphanumeric identifiers that we transfer to your computer’s hard drive to enable our systems to recognise your browser.  If you want to disable cookies, you may do so by changing the settings on your browser.  However, if you do so, you may not be able to use all the functions on the Website.  We use the technical information we collect to have a better understanding of the way people use our Website, to improve the way it works and to personalise it to be more relevant and useful to your needs.
 

Besides our staff, we share the information we collect from you with:

• the third-party service providers who provide (and host) our Website and related services so that they can work with us to make the Website available, improve or develop its functionality, and provide us with related services;
• third-party contractors who provide services to us in connection with our underlying systems;
• third-party contractors who provide services to us in connection with the purposes we collected the information for. 
   

These third-party providers and contractors are not permitted to use this information for their own purposes. 
 

Please be aware that Community Contributions will be publicly available on our Website.  As such, any personal information you include about or within a Community Contribution you make may be publicly accessible.  Community Contributions must comply with our Terms of Use and Community Contributions Rules.  We moderate Community Contributions and they are subject to our Website’s Notice and Takedown Procedure.
 

Providing some information is optional. If you choose not to enter your name and email address, we'll be unable to register you on our Website and provide you with a login. Users who do not register and log-in on our Website cannot make Community Contributions and may not be able to view certain content.  Making Community Contributions is voluntary.
 

You have the right to ask for a copy of any personal information we hold about you, and to ask for it to be corrected if you think it is wrong. If you’d like to ask for a copy of your information, or to have it corrected, please contact us (Tauranga City Council’s Heritage and Research Team) at research@tauranga.govt.nz, or 07 577 7000, or find us at Tauranga City Central Library.  To protect your privacy, and that of others, we may ask you to verify your identity as part of actioning an access or correction request.