Privacy Policy

Farmdoor is a backpacker job and employer review platform for New Zealand. We are committed to protecting the privacy of our users in accordance with New Zealand’s Privacy Act 2020.

Last updated: 27 April 2026

What information we collect

When you create an account, we collect:

• Username— chosen by you and displayed publicly on your profile and alongside your forum posts. Reviews are published anonymously— your username is not shown on the reviews you write.
• Password— stored only as a one-way hash. We never store or have access to your plaintext password.
• Email address(optional) — if you choose to provide one. Not displayed publicly.

When you use Farmdoor, we also store:

• Reviews, ratings, and forum posts you create.
• Votes you cast on forum content.
• Employer claim requests, if you submit one (including your name, business role, and stated reason — visible only to administrators).
• A session cookie (farmdoor_session) that keeps you logged in for up to 7 days. This is a functional cookie only — we do not use tracking or advertising cookies.

Aggregate usage analytics

To understand which pages are useful and how people find Farmdoor, we record a small amount of aggregate usage information directly on our own servers. This is a first-party, privacy-preserving measurement — we do not use Google Analytics, Plausible, or any third-party tracking service, and no tracking or advertising cookies are set.

For each page view we store:

• The path of the page (for example, /employers).
• The host of the referring site if you clicked through from somewhere else (for example, google.com) — never the full URL.
• An approximate two-letter country code, if our hosting provider makes one available.
• An anonymised visitor hash derived from your IP address, your browser’s user-agent string, and a server-side secret that rotates every UTC day. The hash is one-way and cannot be reversed to identify you, and it changes every day so visits cannot be linked across days.

We retain this data for a maximum of 90 days, after which it is automatically deleted. It is visible only to site administrators and is never shared with third parties.

What we do not collect

Farmdoor does not store raw IP addresses in its application database. Your IP is used transiently to derive the anonymised visitor hash described above and is discarded immediately afterwards. Our hosting providers (AWS and Neon) may retain server-level access logs that include IP addresses as part of their standard infrastructure operations. We do not access, process, or share those logs for marketing or profiling purposes.

How we use your information

We use the information we collect to:

• Provide and operate the platform (display reviews, run the forum).
• Authenticate your identity when you log in.
• Moderate content (administrators review pending reviews and employer claims).
• Contact you if you provided an email and we need to reach you about your account.

We do not sell, rent, or share your personal information with third parties for marketing purposes.

Third-party services

Farmdoor uses the following third-party services to operate the platform:

• Amazon Web Services (AWS)— application hosting and domain management.
• Neon— managed PostgreSQL database hosting.

Both services may process data in accordance with their own privacy policies. We have selected hosting in the Asia-Pacific (Sydney) region to keep data geographically close to New Zealand.

Data retention and deletion

You can delete your account at any time from your account settings page. When you delete your account:

• Your username is anonymised (replaced with a random identifier).
• Your password hash and email are permanently removed.
• Your reviews, forum posts, and votes are retained for platform integrity but are no longer attributed to your identity.
• If you owned an employer page, that ownership is released so the employer can be claimed by someone else.

Session cookies expire automatically after 7 days, or immediately when you log out.

Your rights

Under the Privacy Act 2020, you have the right to:

• Access your personal information — your profile and account settings show the information we hold about you.
• Correct your personal information — contact us at the email below to request corrections to your account details.
• Delete your account and associated personal information — available from your account settings.

If you have a privacy concern or want to make a request that cannot be handled through the platform, please contact us at the email below.

Cookies

Farmdoor uses a single, functional session cookie (farmdoor_session). It is:

• HttpOnly— not accessible to client-side JavaScript.
• Secure— transmitted only over HTTPS.
• SameSite: Lax— sent with top-level navigations only.

We do not use any analytics, advertising, or third-party tracking cookies.

Contact

If you have questions about this privacy policy or want to exercise your privacy rights, you can reach us at: privacy@farmdoor.co.nz

If you are not satisfied with our response, you have the right to complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner.

This privacy policy is provided in good faith and describes our current practices. It is not legal advice. We recommend consulting a qualified legal professional for specific legal guidance.