Privacy policy
Te Awa Ventures Limited (NZBN 9429052881329), trading as PowderFactor ("PowderFactor", "we", "us") is a New Zealand company that makes software for drill and blast crews. This policy explains what personal information we collect through the PowderFactor Field mobile app (the "App"), the PowderFactor Field office portal (the "Portal") and this website, why we collect it, who we share it with and the choices you have.
We handle personal information in line with the New Zealand Privacy Act 2020 and, for our Australian customers, the Australian Privacy Principles in the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth). Where the two differ we apply the stricter standard.
1. Two roles: your employer's data and ours
Most information in the App and the Portal is entered by, and belongs to, the organisation that uses Field (usually your employer or the contractor you work for). That organisation decides who is added, what is recorded and how long it is kept, and we hold the information on its behalf. If you are a crew member with a question about a record about you, your organisation's Field administrator is the first place to ask; we will help them respond.
Information you give us directly, for example through the request-access form on this website or by emailing support, is information we hold for our own purposes.
2. What we collect
2.1 In the App and the Portal (held for your organisation)
| Information | Where it comes from | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Your profile: name, work email, roles (for example driller, fitter, supervisor), licences and competencies with their expiry dates, licence numbers and photos of licence cards uploaded by an administrator, and whether your account is active | Entered by your organisation's administrator in the Portal | So you can be identified on records you create, and so your organisation can track who is qualified and licensed to operate what |
| Sign-in credentials: a personal PIN for the App (stored only as a one-way hash, never in plain text) and, for portal users, a Firebase Authentication account with an email address and password (stored by Google, never visible to us) | Generated by the Portal; you change your PIN or password yourself | To sign you in and to attribute records to you |
| Operational records: pre-start inspections, daily logs, drill logs, defects, maintenance and service records, training pass-outs and job packs, including the date and time, the rig or vehicle, the blast or site, and your name or ID as the person who completed or signed the record | Entered by you or your colleagues in the App, or by your organisation in the Portal | This is the purpose of the product: a record of the work your organisation does and who did it, kept for safety, maintenance and regulatory compliance |
| Photos and files: files attached to records, such as a photo of a paper form or a compliance certificate, chosen from the device's files or gallery. The Portal also stores licence photos that an administrator uploads to a person's record | Chosen by the user in the App, or uploaded by an administrator in the Portal | To keep the evidence with the record it supports |
| Signatures: the initials a person draws on screen when signing a record (a pre-start, service, drill log, job pack or training sign-off), stored as an image with the record, together with who signed and when; and, for a job pack's Permit To Work, the name and company of the customer representative who accepts it, with their signature | Drawn on screen in the App by the person signing | To show who attested the record |
| Device records: for each device an organisation pairs, an anonymous device identifier, the name the administrator gives it, the platform (Android or iOS) and the app version, and when and by whom it was paired and when it was last seen | Created when an administrator pairs the device with a one-time code; the App updates "last seen" and the app version | So your organisation can see and manage its devices and remove a lost one |
| Camera: the camera is used only to scan the pairing QR code shown in the Portal. Images from the camera are processed on the device and are not stored or sent; only the code is sent | The device's camera, when you choose to scan. The camera permission is requested only then | To pair a device without typing the code |
| Sign-in activity: who made each App sign-in attempt, the time, whether it succeeded, the device it was made on, and the rig or vehicle selected | Recorded by the App when you sign in | So your organisation can see who was signed in on which rig, and to detect misuse of a PIN |
| Deletion requests made in the App: your name, user ID, the device the request was sent from and the time | Sent by the App when you ask to delete your account and confirm with your PIN | So your organisation's administrator and PowderFactor can handle your request |
| Quotes (Quoting add-on): the customer contact's name, email and phone number, who prepared each quote, who accepted it on the customer's behalf (with their position and purchase order number), and a history of who changed or sent the quote | Entered by your organisation's office users in the Portal | To price work, send quotes to customers and keep a record of what was agreed |
The App does not collect your device's location, your contacts, or any information from other apps.
2.1a PowderFactor Design (held by us)
PowderFactor Design is a desktop application. Its project files, drone photos and designs stay on your computer unless you choose to share them. To check its licence, the application sends us its licence key, a one-way fingerprint of the computer (not its name or serial number), the application version and, as seen by our hosting provider, the country the check came from, when it is activated and about once a day after that. We keep these with the licence, which records the customer it was issued to and, if given, a contact email, so we can manage seats and support you. The application also asks us whether a newer version is available, sending only its version number, and may download components it needs (such as its photo-processing engine) from GitHub and the Python Package Index, which see your IP address when it does.
2.2 Crash reports (held by us)
The App sends crash reports to Google's Firebase Crashlytics so we can find and fix crashes. A crash report contains the state of the App when it failed, the device model, the operating system version and an installation identifier. It does not contain the contents of your records. Crash reports are not used for advertising and we do not sell them.
2.3 On this website (held by us)
- Request-access and contact forms: the name, company, email, phone, country, team size and message you give us, plus the time of the request, and your IP address and browser type, stored with the request. We use these to respond to you and to set up your organisation.
- Our industry survey (powderfactor.com/survey): your answers, the time, and the country your connection came from. If you reached the survey from an email we sent you, your answers are linked to the email address, name and company we wrote to; otherwise they are anonymous unless you choose to leave your details. We use the answers to understand how drill and blast operators work, to decide what to build, and to share summary results (never individual answers or names) with people who ask for them.
- Outreach emails and unsubscribes: we may send a one-off email, with at most one reminder, to work email addresses that businesses publish for enquiries, where we think PowderFactor is relevant to the work. Every email has an unsubscribe link. When you unsubscribe we keep your email address on a do-not-contact list, so that we never email it again from any list.
- Server logs: our hosting provider, Cloudflare, records the IP address, browser type and pages requested for each visit, which we use for security and to keep the site running. Fonts are loaded from Google Fonts, which means your browser sends your IP address to Google when the page loads.
- We do not use advertising cookies or third-party tracking on this website.
2.3a Billing (held by us)
For each customer we keep a billing contact's name, email address and country, the plan and the monthly usage it is billed on (for Field, the number of active users). Invoices are raised and paid through our payment provider, Stripe, which receives the billing contact's name, email and country and the invoice amounts. Card and bank details are entered with Stripe directly and never reach us.
2.3b Questions you ask Offsider (held by us)
The Portal's Help page has Offsider, an assistant that answers questions about PowderFactor from our published guides. When you ask it something we keep the question, its answer, the time, and your organisation, role and user ID, so we can see where the guides fall short and improve them. Offsider answers only from the guides: it does not read your organisation's records. To write the answer, the question and the conversation so far are sent to Anthropic, the company that provides the AI model (see section 4). Please do not include personal or confidential details in a question.
2.4 Cookies and local storage
The Portal keeps your sign-in session, your light-or-dark theme choice and (for platform administrators) the organisation you are viewing in your browser's local storage. These are needed for the Portal to work and are not used to track you across other sites. The App keeps your records on the device so that it works offline, and syncs them when a connection is available. If a device is removed from an organisation while it holds records that haven't uploaded, the App offers to export them as a file through the device's share sheet (for example to email or Google Drive). That file goes only where the user chooses to send it.
3. How we use information
We use personal information to provide and support Field, to keep it secure, to fix problems, to communicate with our customers about their service, and to meet our legal obligations. If we ever want to use information for a new purpose that you would not reasonably expect, we will ask first.
We do not sell personal information, and we do not use the contents of your organisation's records to train any machine-learning model.
4. Who we share it with
We share information only with the service providers we need to run Field, each of which may only use it to provide their service to us:
- Google (Firebase and Google Cloud): hosts the database, file storage, authentication and crash reporting for the App and the Portal. Data is stored in Google Cloud data centres under Google's data-processing terms.
- Cloudflare: serves the Portal and this website and protects them from attack.
- Resend: sends email on our behalf, such as a temporary PIN, a portal invitation, a quote your organisation sends to its customer, or our survey email.
- Anthropic: provides the AI model behind Offsider (section 2.3b). It receives the questions asked of Offsider and the conversation they are part of, and uses them only to write the answer, under its commercial terms, which do not allow it to train its models on them.
- Stripe: our payment provider. It raises our invoices and takes payment, and receives the billing details described in section 2.3a.
- Apple and Google: distribute the App through the App Store and Google Play and provide their own crash and review data to us under their terms.
We may also disclose information where the law requires it, for example to a workplace safety regulator with the authority to request records, or to a professional adviser under a duty of confidence. We will tell the affected organisation unless we are legally prevented from doing so.
Where your information is held, by country:
- Australia: the Field database and stored files, in Google Cloud's Sydney region (australia-southeast1).
- United States: Google (Firebase Authentication sign-in accounts, Crashlytics crash reports and Google Fonts), Resend (email), Anthropic (Offsider's answers), Stripe (billing), Apple and Google for App Store and Google Play distribution, and GitHub and the Python Package Index when PowderFactor Design downloads its components.
- Worldwide: Cloudflare, a United States company, serves the Portal, our admin systems, PowderFactor Design's licence checks and this website from data centres around the world, and keeps our own records (such as website form requests, licences and billing) in its storage services.
Each of these providers handles the information under contractual protections comparable with the Privacy Act 2020 and the Australian Privacy Principles.
5. How long we keep it
Your organisation's records are kept for as long as it has a Field account, because safety and maintenance records are usually required to be retained for several years. When an organisation ends its subscription we provide a full export on request and delete its data 90 days after the account closes, except where we are required by law to keep it longer. Backups are overwritten on a rolling schedule within a further 30 days.
Crash reports are kept by Google for 90 days. Website form submissions and survey answers are deleted automatically 400 days (about 13 months) after we receive them. Unsubscribes are kept for as long as we send email, because the do-not-contact list only works if it is kept. Questions asked of Offsider are kept for up to 12 months, and sooner on request through our data deletion process. PowderFactor Design licence check-ins are kept for as long as the licence exists.
6. Security
All connections use TLS. App PINs are at least 6 digits and are stored only as salted, deliberately slow one-way hashes. Passwords are managed by Google's Firebase Authentication and are never visible to us. Access to your organisation's data in the Portal is limited by role, and every privileged operation runs on our servers rather than in the browser. PINs and other credential material are never included in any export. We review access to production systems and keep the number of people with that access to a minimum (currently the two founders).
If we become aware of a privacy breach that is likely to cause serious harm, we will notify the affected organisation and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner (New Zealand) or the OAIC (Australia) as the law requires.
7. Your rights
You have the right to ask for a copy of the personal information we hold about you and to ask us to correct it. If the information belongs to your organisation, we will work with its administrator to respond. You can also ask us to delete your account or information; see Delete your account or data for how, and for the limits that apply to safety records your organisation must keep.
To make a request, email privacy@powderfactor.com. We will respond within 20 working days. If you are not satisfied with our response you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner in New Zealand or the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.
8. Children
Field is a workplace tool. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 16.
9. Changes to this policy
We will post any changes here and update the date at the top. If a change materially affects how we use personal information, we will email our customers' administrators before it takes effect.
10. Contact
Te Awa Ventures Limited, trading as PowderFactor · NZBN 9429052881329
4 Te Awa Rere Grove, Stokes Valley, Lower Hutt 5019, New Zealand
Privacy: privacy@powderfactor.com · Support: support@powderfactor.com