Legal
The short version: your loan figures never leave your phone, and there is no analytics or advertising code in the app at all.
This policy is issued by Ricekernel Limited (“we”, “us”), a company incorporated in New Zealand. Ricekernel Limited is the controller of the personal information described here. It covers the Payment Calculator app for iPhone and iPad, and this website. ezyplan, our loan planner, has not launched yet; this policy will be updated to cover it before it does.
Because we are a New Zealand company, the Privacy Act 2020 is the law we operate under, and its information privacy principles govern everything we do with your information no matter where you are. We also make the app available through the App Store in a small number of other markets — Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada — so the Australian Privacy Principles, the UK GDPR, US state privacy laws and Canada’s PIPEDA give people in those markets rights on top of that. Your rights, below, sets out each of them.
Payment Calculator is not offered in the European Union or the wider European Economic Area. App Store availability is limited to New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada; we do not price or sell in euros; and we do not target or market the app to people in the EU or the EEA. This policy therefore does not deal with the EU GDPR. If that changes, we will update this page before it does.
If you have a question about anything here, email [email protected].
The repayment maths runs entirely on your device. Your loan amount, interest rate, term, repayment frequency, interest-only setting and your chosen colour scheme are written to the app’s private storage on your phone so the app opens where you left it. There is no network call carrying any of it, and we hold no copy.
The one exception is entirely under your control: if you tap the share button, the app hands a plain-text summary of your figures to the iOS share sheet, and iOS passes it to whichever app you choose. We are not involved in that.
Deleting the app removes this local data. We hold no account for you and cannot recover it.
When a mortgage broker sends a client a branded link, the app needs
to know that this particular install has already claimed that brand,
so the broker is charged for it exactly once. To do that the app
generates a random string on first use, something like
ins_m4k2p9x1qz, and keeps it in its own storage.
We do not use it for analytics, profiling, advertising or measurement, and it is not shared with anyone.
Separately, once your app is carrying a brand it re-checks that brand’s current name, colours and logo with our server each time you bring the app to the foreground, so an updated or withdrawn brand is picked up. That check sends only the brand’s id — not your install id, and nothing about you.
The Broker Studio, where you build and publish a branded version of the calculator, requires an account. On iPhone and iPad Sign in with Apple is the only way to create one — there is no password, and no other sign-in provider is offered. Apple gives us a verified sign-in token; from it we take and store:
Alongside that, your broker record holds a session token the app uses to authenticate its requests, a count of credits purchased and credits consumed, and the created and updated timestamps. That is the whole record.
Sign in with Apple also offers to share your name. The app requests that scope but discards the value — no name of yours is stored. We do not collect your phone number, address, date of birth, government identifiers, licence or credential numbers, or any detail about your clients.
When you build a brand we store what you enter:
Logo and share-card images are stored on Cloudflare R2 and served from a public URL. Once you publish a brand, its name, colours, logo and adviser link are served to anyone who opens your branded link — that is the point of the feature. Draft brands are not served.
We store the image file as you supply it and do not strip embedded metadata. If you pick a camera photo rather than a logo file, any metadata inside it — including location, if your camera recorded it — is stored and published with the image. Upload a logo file.
If you give us your website address, our server fetches that public page once to suggest a logo and colours for you. We keep only the suggestions, not a copy of your site.
Credit packs are sold through Apple’s In-App Purchase. Apple takes the payment and holds the payment details. We never receive your card number, expiry, CVV or billing address, and we cannot charge you.
After a purchase the app sends Apple’s receipt to our server so we can verify it with Apple and add your credits. We then store a purchase record: your broker id, the platform, the product bought, Apple’s transaction id, the number of credits and the time. The transaction id is what stops a replayed receipt granting credits twice.
Refunds are handled by Apple, not by us. See the support page for how to request one.
This is worth stating plainly, because it is unusual. The app contains no analytics SDK, no advertising or attribution SDK, no crash-reporting SDK and no third-party tracking code of any kind. Specifically:
We use a small number of service providers, each processing data only to run the service for us:
We are a New Zealand company, so “overseas” for us means outside New Zealand. All three providers above are based overseas and run their infrastructure in other countries, including the United States, so information we hold about you is stored and processed outside New Zealand.
Railway and Cloudflare hold and process that information solely on our behalf, as our service providers. Under section 11 of the Privacy Act 2020, information held by a provider in that role is treated as still being held by us, so handing it to them is not a disclosure to a foreign entity — we remain responsible for it, and everything in this policy still applies to it. We have satisfied ourselves that their contractual data-protection terms require them to protect it, and where information privacy principle 12 does apply to a transfer we rely on those terms to meet its requirement that the recipient safeguard the information to a standard comparable to the Privacy Act. For personal data leaving the United Kingdom, the UK GDPR calls for its own safeguard — the EU standard contractual clauses are not one on their own — so we rely on the ICO-approved instrument in each provider’s data-protection terms: the International Data Transfer Agreement, or the UK International Data Transfer Addendum where those terms are built on the EU clauses. Information reaching us in New Zealand is covered separately, because New Zealand is one of the countries the UK recognises as providing adequate protection.
Apple is different. When you sign in with Apple or buy a credit pack you are dealing with Apple directly, on Apple’s own terms and under Apple’s own privacy policy — not as our service provider. Apple decides how it handles that information; we only receive the result, being a sign-in token and a purchase receipt.
Our API server writes ordinary request logs to our hosting platform, and like any web server those logs include the IP address a request arrived from. They are operational and security records only, are retained by the platform for approximately 24 hours and then discarded, and no IP address is written to our database or joined to any account.
We will also disclose information where the law requires it, or where it is necessary to investigate abuse of the service.
If you only used the calculator, delete the app. Everything the app stored is on your device and goes with it. The one record we may hold is a redemption row containing a random install id, which cannot be traced back to you.
If you are a broker, you can delete your account from inside the app, in the Broker Studio. You can also email [email protected] from the address on your account and ask us to do it; we will act as soon as we can, and in no case later than 20 working days after we receive your request.
Deletion is immediate and permanent. There is no grace period, nothing is archived, and we cannot undo it. Here is exactly what you lose:
Signing in with the same Apple account afterwards does not bring any of it back. It creates a new, empty broker record.
Whoever and wherever you are, you can ask us what personal information we hold about you, ask us to correct it, and ask us to delete it. One address does all three: [email protected]. Because we are a New Zealand company, the Privacy Act 2020 governs how we handle every one of those requests; where you live may give you further rights on top, and the sections below say what they are. Where two regimes set different deadlines, we work to the shorter one.
Information privacy principles 6 and 7 of the Privacy Act 2020 give you the right to ask for the personal information we hold about you and to ask us to correct it. We will decide on your request and tell you the outcome as soon as we reasonably can, and in no case later than 20 working days after the day we receive it, which is the limit section 40 of the Act sets. If your request is unusually large or complex we may extend that under section 41 — if we do, we will tell you within the original 20 working days, explain why, and give you the new date. In practice we expect to answer well inside the limit.
If you think we have mishandled your information, tell us first. If you are not satisfied with our answer you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner at privacy.org.nz.
For Australian users we also handle personal information in line with the Australian Privacy Principles, which give you the same access and correction rights and require us to respond within 30 days. If you are not satisfied with our answer you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner at oaic.gov.au.
For UK GDPR purposes the data controller is Ricekernel Limited, a company incorporated in New Zealand, and you can reach us at [email protected]. You have the right to access your data, to have it corrected or erased, to restrict or object to how we use it, and to receive a portable copy. We will respond within one month of your request; if it is complex we may extend that by up to two further months, and we will tell you inside the first month if we need to. Our lawful bases, all under Article 6(1) of the UK GDPR, are:
To exercise any of these, email [email protected]. If you are not satisfied with our answer you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk.
We do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined by US state privacy laws, and we do not use it for cross-context behavioural advertising. Residents of states with privacy legislation may exercise their access and deletion rights using the same email address above, and we will respond within the period that state’s law allows — generally 45 days. We will not discriminate against you for exercising a privacy right; there is nothing to discriminate with, as the calculator is free and identical for everyone.
For Canadian users the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act gives you the right to ask what personal information we hold about you, how we have used it and to whom it has been disclosed, and to have it corrected if it is wrong. We will respond within 30 days, which is the limit section 8 of that Act sets. Provincial law may add to this — Quebec’s Law 25 in particular gives Quebec residents further rights. If you are not satisfied with our answer you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada at priv.gc.ca.
This site sets no cookies and runs no analytics. It does load the Quicksand and Nunito typefaces from Google Fonts, which means your browser makes a request to Google’s servers and Google sees your IP address as part of that request. If you submit your email address to our early-access list, we use it only to contact you about early access, and you can ask us to remove it at any time.
Payment Calculator is a financial tool intended for adults, and the Broker Studio is for mortgage brokers acting in a professional capacity. The app is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has given us information, email us and we will delete it.
We have kept that threshold at 16 deliberately. The statutory floors in our markets are lower: the UK sets the digital-consent age at 13, under section 9 of the Data Protection Act 2018, and in the United States COPPA is concerned with children under 13, while New Zealand, Australia and Canada fix no age at all and ask instead whether the individual understands what they are agreeing to. The UK’s Age Appropriate Design Code, meanwhile, treats everyone under 18 as a child. Sixteen sits above every consent age that binds us and below the Code’s definition of a child, and nothing about the app calls for a lower one — the calculator asks for no personal information whatsoever, and the only account we issue is a broker’s.
If we change what we collect or why, we will update this page and move the date at the top. Material changes affecting brokers will also be emailed to the address on the account.
Privacy questions, access requests and deletion requests all go to the same place: [email protected]. For anything else, see support.
The controller of the personal information described in this policy is Ricekernel Limited, a company incorporated in New Zealand.