Legal

Privacy policy

How we handle personal information you send us through this website, under the New Zealand Privacy Act 2020.

This policy covers themedicineman.co.nz. It doesn’t cover anything that happens in person or by email once you’ve written to us directly.

Who we are

The Medicine Man, Aotearoa New Zealand. Email medicineman.aotearoa@gmail.com.

We’re the agency responsible for personal information collected through this site. Email is the way to reach us about anything on this page.

What we collect

Only what you type into our quote request form, and only the fields we need to price an order and post it to you:

• Your name
• Your email address
• Your postal address
• Which products you’re interested in
• Anything else you choose to add in the message box (optional)

We ask for a postal address because the quote has to include postage, and postage depends on where an order is going. We ask for an email address because that’s how the quote comes back to you. Everything except the message box is required — if you’d rather not fill in the form, email us directly at the address above instead.

That is the whole list. We don’t ask for anything “just in case”. There’s nothing on this site to sign up to and nothing to pay for here, so we never collect a password or a card number from you — payment is arranged by bank transfer after we’ve sent you a quote, and none of that happens on this website. Our own staff sign in to a separate area, described below.

What your product selections say about you

This is worth being straight about, because it isn’t obvious. Our products are rongoā — plant medicines — and telling us which ones you’re interested in can suggest something about your health. Asking about the Tataramoa Tea suggests something about sleep, menstruation or menopause; asking about the Healing Balm suggests something about your skin.

So an enquiry through this form is your name, your home address, and a hint about your health, in one message. We treat it that way:

• It goes to one mailbox, ours, and is not copied to anyone else.
• It is never used for marketing and never added to a mailing list.
• We don’t keep a customer database on this website. Your enquiry is an email, it is deleted when we’re finished with it, and nothing you tick on the form is stored in the site itself.
• The page-view counting described below records that an enquiry was sent and nothing about what was in it — not the products, not your name, not your address.

You’re welcome to leave the message box empty and tick nothing you don’t want to, or to email us directly instead of using the form. If you tell us about a health condition in the message box, that’s your choice — we don’t ask for it and we don’t need it to give you a quote.

Nothing on this website is medical advice, and we are not a health provider — so the Health Information Privacy Code doesn’t apply to us. The Privacy Act 2020 does, and the care described on this page is what it requires.

Why we collect it

To read your request and email you back a quote. That’s the only purpose. We don’t use your details for marketing, we don’t add you to a mailing list, and we don’t sell, rent or trade personal information to anyone.

The confirmation email

When you send the form we email you a copy of what you sent, so you have a record and can correct anything that’s wrong by replying. That email lists the products you selected and repeats your message, so it will sit in your own inbox until you delete it. We mention it because it isn’t something you asked us to send, and because of what it contains — see above. It goes only to the address you typed on the form.

What we don’t do

This site carries no advertising tags and no tracking pixels. There’s no Google Analytics, no Meta pixel, and no third-party script of any kind. Nothing here follows you to other websites, and nothing about your visit is sent to another company.

We do count how many people read our pages. That happens entirely on our own server and is described under counting page views below.

We also deliberately don’t use reCAPTCHA or a similar captcha service, because it would send information about you to an overseas provider. Instead the form carries a hidden field that automated scripts tend to fill in and people never see. That check runs on our own server, and nothing about it — or about you — is sent anywhere else.

One thing worth naming: the fonts on this site are served by Google Fonts. Loading them means your browser requests files from Google’s servers, which — as with any file your browser fetches — makes your IP address visible to them. We send Google nothing about you, and there is no analytics or advertising attached to it. Everything else this site loads comes from our own server.

Cookies

This site sets one cookie, named medicineman_session, and it does nothing but security. It holds a random identifier with no personal information in it. On the home page it exists so that we can tell a real submission of the quote form from one forged by another website; in the staff area it keeps a signed-in staff member signed in.

It is not used to track you, it is not shared with anyone, and it is deleted when you close your browser. There is no cookie banner here because there is nothing to accept or refuse — a cookie strictly necessary for security isn’t something a site should be asking permission for and then breaking if you say no. Counting page views doesn’t use a cookie at all — see below.

Counting page views

We keep a simple count of how often each page is read, so we know which parts of the site are useful and when people are looking. It runs on our own server. Nothing is sent to an analytics company, and no information about your visit leaves us.

For each page view we record the date and time, which of our pages it was, and whether the visitor was using a phone, a tablet or a computer. If you followed a link from another website we record the name of that website — for example google.com — but never the page you came from, and never anything you searched for.

We do not store your IP address, and we do not set a cookie to count you. So that we can tell one visit from ten page views, we store a short scrambled code worked out from your connection and your browser. That code is rebuilt from scratch every day, so it can’t be used to recognise you tomorrow, it can’t be used to follow you over time, and it can’t be turned back into your address. It isn’t linked to your name, your email, or anything you have ever sent us.

We also count how many of our visitors aren’t people at all — search engines and AI assistants reading the site — because we’d like to be found by both.

We count one thing you do as well as one thing you read: that a quote request was sent successfully. That record is a date and the word “enquiry” — not your name, not your address, and not which products you ticked.

These counts are kept for up to 400 days, so we can compare one season with the same season a year earlier, and are then deleted automatically. Only our own management can see them, and what they see is totals — never one person’s activity, because we don’t hold it.

Our staff area

Part of this site is a password-protected area our staff sign in to. It isn’t open to the public, and nothing you send through the quote form appears in it — requests go to our mailbox, not into the website. Signing in shows totals and staff account settings, and no customer information of any kind.

For each staff account we hold a name, a work email address, a role, and the time of the most recent sign-in. Passwords are never stored — only a one-way cryptographic hash, which can’t be turned back into the password. Accounts are created and removed by our management, and are deleted or disabled when someone no longer needs access.

If you’re a staff member and want to see or correct what’s held about your account, ask a manager, or use the contact details at the end of this page.

Our server logs

Our server keeps a short technical log so we can tell whether the site is working. It’s written to record what happened, not what you submitted — it deliberately contains no names, email addresses, postal addresses, product selections or message text.

Your IP address is never stored in readable form. Where we need to recognise repeated attempts from the same connection — specifically, to stop someone guessing at a staff password — we store a one-way salted hash of the address, which can’t be turned back into the original. Logs are deleted automatically after 30 days.

Who can see your request

Your request is emailed to our own mailbox and read by us. Beyond that:

• Our hosting and email providers operate the servers this website and its email run on, and can technically access what is stored there. Requests arrive in a Gmail mailbox, so Google is one of them.

Nobody else receives a copy. We don’t disclose your information to anyone else unless you ask us to, or the law requires it.

Where your information is stored

This website is hosted on servers provided by Hostinger, and requests are delivered to a Gmail mailbox. Depending on the region each is provisioned in, information you send through the site may be stored on servers outside New Zealand. Where that’s the case we rely on those providers’ contractual commitments to protect it to a standard comparable to the Privacy Act.

How long we keep it

Request emails are kept only while they’re useful — long enough to quote, post the order and handle any follow-up — and are then deleted. Given what a request can imply about your health, we don’t keep them as a customer list. Technical logs are deleted automatically after 30 days, and page-view counts after 400 days.

Keeping it safe

The site is served over an encrypted HTTPS connection. Our configuration and credentials sit outside the publicly reachable part of the server, and the log directory can’t be fetched over the web. Staff sign-ins are rate limited, and staff sessions expire after a period of inactivity.

No website can promise perfect security. What we can say is that this site holds no customer database to lose: your request lives in an email, not in the website, and we don’t keep more of it or keep it longer than we need.

Seeing or correcting your information

Under the Privacy Act you have the right to ask us what personal information we hold about you, to get a copy of it, and to ask us to correct it if it’s wrong. Email medicineman.aotearoa@gmail.com and we’ll sort it out. We may need to check who you are first. There’s no charge, and we’ll respond within 20 working days.

You can also ask us to delete a request you’ve sent, and we will unless we need to keep it for a legal reason.

If you’re not happy

Tell us first and we’ll try to put it right. If you’re still not satisfied you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner: privacy.org.nz, or 0800 803 909.

Changes to this policy

If we change how this site handles personal information, we’ll update this page at the same time. This version was last reviewed on 17 August 2026.