The Farmers Trading Company Ltd

Privacy Notice

1. Privacy Notice Overview

The Farmers Trading Company Limited (Farmers, us, we, our) is a trusted Kiwi brand which recognises the importance of protecting and securing personal information. Our brands include Stevens and this Privacy Notice applies when you interact with Stevens including when you enter a Stevens store or online at www.stevens.co.nz.

This Privacy Notice outlines our commitment to protecting your personal information and to give you reassurances of our integrity in how we handle personal information. We respect and value the information provided to us and we will only use personal information in accordance with applicable privacy laws.

This Privacy Notice applies to personal information we collect, hold and use about you when we carry out our business activities, such as when you purchase our goods and services, visit our websites or other digital platforms, communicate or interact with us, enter any competitions or complete any surveys or enter our stores.

We may update our Privacy Notice from time to time. Amendments will be published on our web pages www.farmers.co.nz and www.stevens.co.nz.

2. Personal information we collect

We collect personal information to carry out our business activities and to provide you an enriched customer experience. The type of information we collect includes name, address, email, phone number, gender, date of birth, your shopping and marketing preferences, your purchases, delivery information and any other information that you provide to us during our interactions. If you have an online account we will keep your login details and password.

In most instances, we collect personal information directly from you such as:

The information you supply when enquiring about or purchasing a product or service (by phone, in person or electronically), when you interact with us via our customer service centre, phone, email, mail, website, complete any survey/application forms, enter any of our competitions or special promotions/activities, join our Farmers Feedback community or when you deal with team members in our stores.

When you engage with us on social media (such as via Facebook or Instagram).

When you are present in our stores or surrounding areas we may collect images and video surveillance of you. In circumstances where there may be suspected unlawful activity we may collect physical appearance details and other information about the incident. (See section 3.3 Third Party Crime Prevention Platform for further details).

When visiting any of our websites we may collect the following information: the IP address (including location), domain name, the date, time and duration of visits, search terms, the pages, products, categories and documents accessed, the previous site accessed (i.e. the referring URL), the type of browser being used. See also Cookie, identifiers and remarketing section on other information we may collect.

If there is an incident/accident while visiting our stores, we may ask you to complete a Health and Safety form.

When you ‘email a friend’ on one of our products on our websites.
When you submit a product review on our Stevens website.

If we are unable to collect this information, we may not be able to provide you with the products or services, or carry out a particular activity you have requested or we are required to do.

We may also collect personal information from third parties such as from other retailers and the Police to prevent and detect crime and to keep our community safe (See section 3.3 Third Party Crime Prevention Platform for further details).

3. The purposes for collecting personal information and who we may share information with

3.1 Use of information

We collect personal information for the primary purpose to market, personalise, recommend, promote, advertise, sell and deliver our products and services. In addition, we collect personal information:

To improve and personalise your experience with us, such as when you are in store, on-line or when otherwise interacting with us.
To communicate with you and answer any questions or provide information or advice.
To run competitions, carry out surveys and research analysis. We may run competitions and promotions (either on our own or with third parties) and you may be asked to provide personal information to be eligible to participate. We (and any other third party) will use this information to administer the competition, notify winners and for any other purpose set out in the relevant terms and conditions.
For warranty and product recall purposes.
For marketing and retargeting purposes including to market, promote, recommend and advertise the products and services of our selected business partners. This includes displaying to you customised or targeted promotional material or advertising (based on your past activity on our websites, purchases in-store, and other websites) and remarketing our services to you (see below for further information on remarketing). For details on direct marketing, see the Farmers Club Members section and Stevens Membership section below).
To undertake our administrative and operational functions.
To detect and prevent fraud, criminal or disorderly behaviour and theft and to monitor and ensure the safety of people in our stores (see section 3.3 Third Party Crime Prevention Platform).
To comply with laws or regulations or to comply with any directions given by regulators or authorities.
Investigate a breach of any of our terms and conditions or any suspected unlawful or criminal activity.

We will also use your personal information for any purpose permitted by the Privacy Act or required by any other law.

If we are unable to collect personal information, we may not be able to carry out the specific activity or task, such as provide the products or services as requested.

3.2 How we share your personal information

We may disclose your personal information to undertake any of the purposes set out above, or where permitted or required by law or as otherwise detailed in this Privacy Notice. Recipients of your personal information may include:

Our employees, contractors or service providers, to the extent reasonably necessary for them to carry out their duties/obligations. This may include marketing CRM and personalisation providers, cloud service providers, internet service providers, IT systems administrators, mailing houses, couriers, payment processors, data entry service providers, research agencies, adtech and martech service providers, search merchandising and personalisation providers, lawyers and business advisors.
Suppliers of products and services for delivery, product warranty and recall purposes.
Any person where we are required or permitted by law to disclose information to. This may include the police service, ambulance service, or government departments or regulators within New Zealand in connection with law enforcement activities and emergency services.
Other retailers and the Police (see section 3.3 Third Party Crime Prevention Platform).

We require any third party to protect personal information against any unauthorised use, access or disclosure in accordance with the Privacy Act.

Cookie information and browsing history is also shared with third parties – see section below on Cookies, identifiers and remarketing.

3.3 Third party crime prevention platform

We currently use a third-party crime prevention platform (Auror) to assist us in managing the detection and prevention of crime and the protection of people in our stores and our property. We may upload CCTV images, photos and other personal information about an incident or event where we reasonably believe unlawful activity may have occurred. It is through this platform that information may be shared by us with other retailers and the Police and we may collect information from other retailers and the Police. See www.auror.co.

4. Farmers Club Card Members

4.1 Additional collection of personal information and uses

In addition, if you are a Farmers Club Card Member, we collect the information you supply to us when you apply to be a Farmers Club member, such as name, address, email, phone number, gender, month and year of birth to administer your membership and enhance your experience with us. As a Farmers Club member we may also collect information:

About your purchases of products and services, reward redemption history, special shopping preferences.

You supply to us via our Farmers Preference Centre.

About your browsing history when you are logged in and browse our website. If you have signed into Farmers Club we can identify you on that visit to our website and on subsequent visits to our site, even where you do not sign in.

From any credit provider (who has granted you credit and you earn points when using the finance card) about the number of Farmers Club points you have earnt when using the finance card.

When you email a ‘wishlist’ from our website.

In addition to the purposes set out above, as a Farmers Club member we use your personal information to:

Administer Farmers Club Card and the Farmers Preference Centre.
Target and personalise relevant Farmers advertising for products and services through digital marketing channels including but not limited to Facebook and Instagram, digital display networks, video networks such as YouTube and search services such as Google. This is done through matching customer contact details (e.g. a customer’s email address) with a 3^rd party (e.g. the email associated with a Facebook account) through the use of a secure hashing algorithm. This algorithm (known as SHA256) irreversibly hashes a customer’s contact details, and ensures that only ‘matched records’ are visible to the 3^rd party. The 3^rd party only receives the hashed data and matches the hashed date we provide with the hashed data the 3^rd party has, meaning the 3^rd party has no ability to view the actual customer's contact details.
Promote and market to you the products and services we sell and provide and the products and services of our selected business partners. To do this we may use a third party service provider to check whether you are a current customer with our selected business partners.

4.2 Farmers Club Card Members and Direct Marketing

If you are a Farmers Club Card Member we may send direct marketing communications and information about products and services offered by us or our retail brands, suppliers or selected business partners. This may include, but is not limited to by post and if you consent via email, SMS, social media and other electronic channels.

Where we have received an indication to a preference for a method of communication, we will endeavour to use that method wherever practical to do so. By consenting to receive email marketing communications from Farmers, customers may also receive access to a range of exclusive offers and rewards not available to the general public. Click on the link to join Farmers Club: https://www.farmers.co.nz/register.html.

We do not provide personal information to other organisations for the purposes of direct marketing unless expressly authorised by you.

5. Stevens Membership

5.1 Additional collection of personal information and uses

In addition, if you are a Stevens Member, we collect the information you supply to us when you apply to be a Stevens member, such as name, address, email, phone number, gender, and month of birth to administer your membership and enhance your experience with us. As a Stevens member we may also collect information:

About your purchases of products and services, special shopping preferences.

About your browsing history when you are logged in and browse our website. If you have signed into Stevens we can identify you on that visit to our website and on subsequent visits to our site, even where you do not sign in.

If you are also a Farmers Club member, from any credit provider (who has granted you credit and you earn points when using the finance card) about the number of Farmers Club points you have earnt when using the finance card.

When you email a ‘wishlist’ from our website.

In addition to the purposes set out above, as a Stevens member we use your personal information to:

Target and personalise relevant Stevens advertising for products and services through digital marketing channels including but not limited to Facebook and Instagram, digital display networks, video networks such as YouTube and search services such as Google. This is done through matching customer contact details (e.g. a customer’s email address) with a 3^rd party (e.g. the email associated with a Facebook account) through the use of a secure hashing algorithm. This algorithm (known as SHA256) irreversibly hashes a customer’s contact details, and ensures that only ‘matched records’ are visible to the 3^rd party.
Promote and market to you the products and services we sell and provide and the products and services of our selected business partners. To do this we may use a third party service provider to check whether you are a current customer with our selected business partners.

5.2 Stevens Members and Direct Marketing

If you are a Stevens Member we may send direct marketing communications and information about products and services offered by us or our retail brands, suppliers or selected business partners. This may include, if you consent, via email, social media and other electronic channels.

Where we have received an indication to a preference for a method of communication, we will endeavour to use that method wherever practical to do so. By consenting to receive email marketing communications from Stevens, customers may also receive access to a range of exclusive offers and rewards not available to the general public.

We do not provide personal information to other organisations for the purposes of direct marketing unless expressly authorised by you.

6. How we hold and protect your personal information

6.1 How we hold personal information

Farmers holds your personal information in either electronic or hard copy form. When we receive information electronically we retain this information in our computer systems and databases. This includes computer software programs, internet servers, and hosted internet solutions. Information received in hard copy (commonly paper) is normally retained in our files and a copy may be made to our electronic files.

We may use third-party service providers to store your personal information and provide us with services. This means that we may transfer personal information, or access it from, countries other than New Zealand.

We recognise that we are accountable for your personal information wherever it is in the world and we will take reasonable steps to ensure that any third-party service providers we use can meet our privacy and security expectations.

We retain your information for as long as we need to carry out the purposes of collection, or longer if we are required to by law.

6.2 Security

We use industry standard security measures to safeguard and protect all personal information. This includes taking reasonable steps to protect personal information from misuse, loss, unauthorised access, modification or unauthorised disclosure.

Wherever your personal information is stored, we take reasonable steps to ensure that it is protected against loss or unauthorised access, modification, use or disclosure. For example:

Farmers systems are protected by firewalls and modern encryption standards.
Farmers systems are password protected, and access is monitored and audited.
All employees are required to adhere to the Farmers IT and Security related suite of policies.
Access to the personal information we store is limited to those staff members who have a legitimate business requirement to use it.
We make privacy and information security training available to employees.
We have a data breach management procedure in place.
Information is backed up regularly, and backups are encrypted and held in secure storage facilities.

7. Cookies, identifiers and remarketing

7.1 Cookies and identifiers

We use cookies and identifiers on our websites. Cookies are small pieces of information captured when a device is used to access online content. We use cookies to ensure a more streamlined and personalised online shopping experience, to identify and store personal preferences. We may use temporary (session) cookies or permanent cookies when devices access our websites, which allows us to recognise individual browsers and track the web pages visited and web pages the device has navigated from. We use cookies to help improve the customer experience with us. See section below on opting out of cookies. Outlined below are some other reasons we use cookies:

To keep track of products or services viewed, so that we can send directly or through third party service providers, information and advertising about those products or services, or other similar related products or services we think may be of interest.
To measure traffic patterns, to determine which areas of our websites have been visited, and to measure transaction patterns, produce data of web traffic and customer web activity through our websites or apps.
To research and analyse habits so that we can improve our products, services and online content and customise this to individuals.
To operate our websites efficiently with a high level of functionality.
To measure the effectiveness of our marketing initiatives, measure the number of advertising referrals we have received to our websites from other websites. This includes using cookies to record if you have clicked through from an advertisement on a external website or search engine, such as but not limited to Google, Bing, Instagram, Meta to understand what advert you clicked through to and if this led to an online sale (conversion).
To personalise your experience on our websites by recommending products, services and offers that we believe are relevant to you based on past behaviour or purchases online and in our stores.

We also allow third parties to place cookies and other identifiers on our websites to collect information on your browsing history. The third parties use the information for marketing or advertising purposes and to display customised or targeted promotional, marketing or advertising material on our websites and on other websites or social media sites that you visit. Currently at the date of this Privacy Notice (and may change from time to time), third parties include Google Analytics, Alphabet (Google) and Meta (Facebook & Instagram) , and in addition for farmers.co.nz, Flashtalking, Salesforce, and Quantcast.

7.2 When we send personal information to third parties

7.2.1 Google

We use Google Enhanced Conversions to improve the accuracy of our conversion tracking. Google may receive hashed customer data such as email address, and phone number to match conversions to Google accounts.

We use secure one-way hashing algorithm called SHA256 on the data to Google for Enhanced Conversions.

7.2.2 Meta

We use Meta CAPI to send web events directly from our servers to Meta. Meta may receive hashed customer data such as email address, and phone number to match conversions. This helps us track conversions and optimise our advertising on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. The data shared includes customer actions on our website, such as page views, purchases, and other interactions.

7.2.3 Salesforce Marketing Cloud

We use Salesforce to help personalise your experience online. All page and product views are sent to Salesforce and personal information such as but not limited to, name, address, email address, phone number and Farmers Club number. Salesforce data is held in an environment that can only be accessed by assigned Farmers Trading Company employees and not Salesforce employees.

7.3 Remarketing

Remarketing involves using your browsing history on our website to show you advertising related to your history after you leave our site. For example, a product you viewed on our website may be advertised to you while you're visiting another website or using a social media platform.

We may share cookie data (collected via your browser) about your browsing activity on our websites with the following remarketing providers: Meta and Google. If you wish to opt out of remarketing, please refer to section 7.4: Opting Out Information.

Additionally, we may securely share Farmers Club card member data - such as email addresses and phone numbers - in hashed form (meaning the actual data cannot be viewed) with the following remarketing provider: Meta and Google. Please note: Farmers Club card members cannot opt out of this data sharing.

Remarketing providers listed are current as of the date of this Privacy Notice and may change over time.

If you wish to opt-out of remarketing, see Opt-Out Information below.

7.4 Opting out from cookies, analytics and remarketing

You may modify your browser settings to accept or decline cookies. You may also go to www.allaboutcookies.org or to www.aboutads.info/choices for instructions on how to disable cookies. If you choose to configure your computer so that it disables cookies or does not accept them, you may not be able to make full use of our websites.

Here are the links to opt-out of cookies (current as at the date of this Privacy Notice and may change from time to time):

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/privacy/policies/cookies

Instagram - https://privacycenter.instagram.com/policies/cookies/

Google - https://myadcenter.google.com/home?sasb=true&ref=ad-settings

Google Analytics - https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/181881?hl=en

Flashtalking - https://www.flashtalking.com/optout

Quantcast - https://www.quantcast.com/opt-out/

You can opt out of personalised ads here for Google https://adssettings.google.com/partnerads?hl=en and you can double-check your Facebook Adverts settings

Please note that while you are opting out of the 3^rd parties remarketing to you, if you are a Farmers Club member, your hashed data may still be shared with the 3^rd parties as per point 7.3 above.

7.5 Links to other websites and services

The Farmers and Stevens websites may contain links to other sites which are not administered or governed by Farmers. These are provided solely for the convenience of our visitors. We are not responsible for the content of these websites or how your personal information will be handled. We are not liable in respect of any use of these linked websites.

8. Accessing and correcting your personal information

Please contact us (as set out below) if you would like access to the personal information we may hold about you or if you would like us to update or correct it. We may require further information to assist the retrieval of information and or verify your identity and reserve the right to charge a reasonable fee for gaining access.

We will handle any request in accordance with the relevant privacy regulations. Generally, if requested we will amend any personal information which is inaccurate, incomplete or out of date. If we are not able or unwilling to provide access to any personal information or to correct any personal information held by us, we will provide reason for declining to provide.

Enquiries on how to access personal information can be emailed to:

privacyofficer@farmers.co.nz

Or by contacting Farmers on 0800 327 637 or by mail to:

The Privacy Officer

The Farmers Trading Company Limited
Legal Services
Private Bag 94060

Manukau 2241

Privacy Complaints

Any concerns that we may have breached our privacy obligations or to make a complaint please contact us. If you make a complaint, we will endeavour to respond and resolve any complaints promptly. For more information about privacy generally, or if your complaint is not resolved to your satisfaction, you may contact the Office of the Privacy Commissioner at www.privacy.org.nz and on (04) 474 7590.

9. Safety Cameras

To keep our team members, contractors, customers, visitors and members of the public who may be in our workplaces safe, we have Safety Cameras in our stores. The cameras will record images (video) and sound (audio). The cameras will be worn by our staff. The cameras will only be activated when an event occurs in a store where the safety of our staff and/or customers may be at risk.

The purposes of collecting images and sound are to:

Keep safe our team members, customers and other people in our stores.
Meet our obligations under the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015.
Detect, reduce and prevent criminal, threatening, abusive or disorderly behaviour.
Investigate complaints and suspected unlawful or criminal behaviour.
Respond to access and correction requests.

We will use the information for any other purpose permitted by law.

The information may be shared with:

Our employees, contractors and service providers but only to the extent necessary to carry out their duties/obligations.
Other retailers/Police (see section 3.3 Third Party Crime Prevention Platform).
Any person we are permitted to or required to by law.