Privacy policy

1. The short version

The rest of this page is the detail behind those seven lines. This policy covers privateencounters.co.nz and is written to the Privacy Act 2020.

2. What we collect

If you just read the site

• Whether you've passed the 18+ gate. One cookie, no identity attached.
• A hashed version of your IP address, if you report a listing or hit a rate limit. Salted and one-way - we can tell two reports came from the same connection, but we cannot work out where that connection is.
• Basic aggregate counts: how many people viewed a listing, how many tapped a phone number. Numbers, not people. We don't build a profile of you and we couldn't identify you from any of it.

No account, no name, no email. You can browse this entire site and leave nothing behind but a cookie you can clear.

If you save listings

Saved listings live in your browser, not on our server. No account, no email address, and nothing that ties the list to you. All we receive is a count: an advertiser can see that a number of people saved their listing, never who, and we hide the number entirely until enough people have saved it that it identifies nobody.

Clearing your browser data removes it, including from us, because we never had it.

If you have an account you can choose to keep the list on it, so it survives a new phone. That is off unless you turn it on, and it is the one thing here that means we hold a list of listings against your email address. Turning it off deletes our copy immediately, in that request, not on a schedule and not on request.

If you ask for alerts

We keep your email address, what you asked to hear about, the exact wording you agreed to, and when. You have to confirm the address before anything is sent, so nobody can sign you up. We do not track whether you open our emails or what you click, because a record of which listing you opened an email about would be more sensitive than the fact you subscribed.

Every alert carries a one-click stop link, which works immediately, and you can drop a single city or listing without losing the rest. No advertiser is ever told who follows them. If you never confirm the address, we delete it within a week.

If you advertise

• Your email address. Needed to run the account. It never appears on your listing and it doesn't need your real name in it.
• Your password - as an irreversible hash, never the password itself. We literally cannot see it.
• Your working name, and everything you choose to put in your listing: photos, bio, rates, city, availability, contact number.
• A hash of the IP you signed up from and the ones you log in from, for spotting account takeovers and ban evasion.
• Payment records: which plan, how much NZD, which coin, the invoice, the receiving address, the confirmation. Blockchain records are public by design and outside our control.
• Whether you're verified. Identity and phone checks run through an independent verification partner; we're told only the result - verified or not - with a reference id and timestamps. We never receive your ID document or your selfie.
• Your listing's stats - views, contacts, bumps - which we show you in your dashboard.

If you report something

What you wrote, which listing, and a hash of your IP. Your email only if you chose to give it, and only so we can ask a follow-up. We never show any of it to the person you reported - including your email, including if they ask, including if they're angry.

3. What we don't collect

We also strip the metadata out of every photo on upload - the GPS coordinates, the device, the timestamp. Your camera writes that in without asking you and it has put people in danger on other sites. It never reaches our storage.

4. Identity verification

Verification is required before a listing is published. We engage Sumsub, an independent provider, to run it on our behalf. We're not sent your document or your selfie - Sumsub tells us pass or fail, and that is the whole of what reaches us. But because Sumsub does this for us, we stay responsible for it under New Zealand privacy law; it isn't simply "their problem".

The check includes a face-match, which is biometric processing under New Zealand's Biometric Processing Privacy Code 2025. We've written down why we use it, why we think it's proportionate, and the manual alternative for anyone it doesn't suit - on our biometrics page.

Verification uses a specialist provider that operates internationally, so your identity data is processed by them, overseas, under their own security and retention terms rather than ours. We're being straight about that because it matters - and the trade-off is that the most sensitive document you own never lands on our servers at all. Your legal name is used only for the check, with the partner, and is never shown to clients or anywhere public on this site.

More detail on the verification page.

5. What we use it for

Only these things. Nothing else, and no quiet expansion later - if we ever want to use your information for something new, we'll ask first.

• Running your account and publishing your listing.
• Taking payment and keeping the invoice records the law requires.
• Moderation - checking listings before they go live and acting on reports.
• Keeping people safe: verifying age, spotting coercion patterns, catching scammers and ban evasion.
• Emailing you about your account. Your listing is about to expire, your listing was rejected and here is why, we replied to your report. Never marketing - we have no newsletter and no plans for one.
• Aggregate stats, so we know which cities need more listings and which pages are broken.
• Meeting a legal obligation when we genuinely have one.

6. Who else sees it

The only people who see anything

• Cloudflare, who host the site, the database and the images. They process it on our instructions and can't use it for anything else. Data sits in their global network - a New Zealand site with an international audience can't realistically avoid that, and we'd rather say so than pretend.
• Our verification partner, a specialist identity-verification provider, but only if you choose to verify. Your ID and selfie go straight to them and stay with them, processed overseas under their own security and retention. They send us the result - verified or not - and nothing else. We never see the document.
• Our own moderators, for the listing review - checking profiles and photos before they go live. Access is logged, it's the minimum needed to do the job, and looking at something you have no reason to look at is a sackable offence here.
• Beyond those, nobody. No CRM, no email marketing platform, no session recorder, no ad network, no payment processor - because we don't take cards.

When your information leaves New Zealand

Some of the people above are overseas: Cloudflare (hosting, worldwide), our verification partner and our email provider (both largely in the United States). New Zealand's Privacy Act 2020 lets us send personal information offshore only where the people receiving it are required to protect it to a standard comparable to the Act's. We rely on that: each is bound by a written agreement to handle your information only on our instructions and to protect it accordingly, and we send each of them the least we can - our verification partner never sends us your documents, and our email provider only ever handles what is in an email we ask it to send. If you would rather your information stayed entirely in New Zealand, we can't promise that, and we'd sooner tell you than pretend.

Police and legal requests

We'll hand information to New Zealand Police if we're legally required to, or if we believe someone is at risk of serious harm - a person under 18, someone being coerced or trafficked, a credible threat to a life. That's a real exception and we're not going to hedge about it. We also do it proactively when we find that sort of thing ourselves.

Outside those cases, we don't just hand things over because someone official-sounding asked. We check the request is lawful, we give the minimum that answers it, and - unless we're legally barred from telling you - we'll tell you it happened.

A worried partner, a private investigator, an employer, or someone claiming to be a client gets nothing. Ever. We don't confirm accounts exist. Sex work is legal in New Zealand and "someone wants to know" is not a legal basis.

7. How long we keep it

When the clock runs out, deletion is automatic - a scheduled job, not a person remembering. That's the only kind of retention promise worth making.

8. Cookies

Two, both strictly necessary: one that remembers you passed the 18+ gate, and one that keeps you logged in. That's the lot. No advertising cookies, no analytics cookies, no third-party cookies - which is why you've never seen a consent banner here, and why you never will.

Full detail on the cookies page.

9. How we protect it

• HTTPS everywhere, encryption at rest, no exceptions.
• Passwords hashed with a slow, salted algorithm designed for the job. A stolen database still doesn't give anyone your password.
• We hold no identity documents at all. Your ID and selfie go to the verification partner, never to us, so there is nothing here to leak.
• Photo metadata stripped on upload, before it is ever written to disk.
• Payment keys aren't here to steal. The system holds public key material only - it cannot derive a private key, by design. There is no wallet on this server to drain.
• Moderator access is logged and least-privilege.
• Rate limits and lockouts on login, so a leaked password from another site isn't enough on its own.

No site is unbreakable and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. What we can promise is that we hold as little as possible - so there's less to take - and that if we ever have a breach that could hurt you, we'll tell you and the Privacy Commissioner promptly, as the Privacy Act requires. We won't sit on it while we work out the PR.

Found a security hole? Email support@privateencounters.co.nz. We'll thank you, we'll fix it, and we won't come after you for looking.

10. Your rights

Under the Privacy Act 2020 you have real rights here, and we're not going to make you fight for them.

11. Asking us things

Privacy questions, access requests, deletion requests: support@privateencounters.co.nz. Every email to that address is read by a person, and a privacy request - seeing, correcting, or deleting what we hold - has the Privacy Act's timeframes applying to it. You'll get a real answer, not a template, and we won't try to talk you out of it.

You don't have to use your account email to ask, and you don't have to explain why.

Our privacy officer

The Privacy Act 2020 requires us to have a named person responsible for how we handle your information. We do - they are named on our operator details page - and you can reach them directly at privacy@privateencounters.co.nz. If you've asked us something about your privacy and feel we haven't dealt with it properly, you can also complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner at privacy.org.nz.

If something goes wrong

If personal information is ever exposed in a way that could cause you serious harm, the Privacy Act requires us to tell you and to notify the Privacy Commissioner, and we will - promptly, in plain language, and with what you can do about it. For the people who use this site that is not a formality, so we treat it as the most serious thing that can happen here.

We'll update this page as the site changes. If a change matters to you, we'll email you about it rather than quietly bumping the date at the top.