Customers & Privacy: Are you protecting yourself when capturing customer information?

The ethics and responsibilities around the Privacy Act 1993 are very important – fall foul of them and you could find yourself being investigated by the Privacy Commissioner.  At AutoPlay we have an upcoming feature designed to help dealerships ensure they are clear and transparent when dealing with customers when using the Sales Pipeline App.

Before proceeding we need to make it clear that AutoPlay are not legal experts, and that anything discussed in this article should not be considered formal advice.  As a business operating in NZ you are responsible for ensuring you are meeting your obligations under the Privacy Act 1993.  You can find out more information about this at https://www.privacy.org.nz/.  If you are unsure about your responsibilities seek independent advice.

At AutoPlay we provide tools that help dealerships capture customer information.  We have our own Privacy Policy that surrounds how we store dealerships customer data, that the ownership stays with the dealership and ensures that we don’t use it for any purpose other than what it was captured for.
However just because AutoPlay have a Privacy Policy it doesn’t mean that the dealership is covered by it.  The dealership needs to have its own Privacy Policy in place to handle the collection of customer information – AutoPlay is just one method that dealers can use to do so.

At AutoPlay we have always encouraged dealerships to include a Privacy Statement within their Test Drive T&C’s.  The reality is that in most cases by the time a Test Drive is being completed the customer information has already been captured, so we have relied on the dealerships own internal procedures to disclose their Privacy Policy to the customer.

In the 16.2 iOS Release scheduled for 30th June we have added a new Privacy Policy button to the Create New Lead screen.  This field is definitely not compulsory so if you are confident you are meeting your obligations it is not necessary to show this other than disclosing that it is available to view.  However, this new feature enables Sales Pipeline users to show customers their Privacy Policy and let them sign to acknowledge they have read it.

The Privacy Policy allows a multiple page PDF to be uploaded.  In the time leading up to the 16.2 release AutoPlay will create a Privacy Policy PDF from your Privacy Statement on your website.  If no Privacy Policy exists on your website (naughty!) we will be adding the Privacy element that has been incorporated into your Test Drive T&C’s.  If you want to take the opportunity to review your Privacy Statement and provide AutoPlay with a new one you can send through a PDF at any time to support@autoplay.co.nz