bookkeeper express is committed to protecting your privacy. We want to provide a safe and secure online environment for your use.

The purpose of this Privacy Policy is to tell you what kind of information we may gather about you when you visit our site, how we may use that information, whether we disclose it to anyone, and the choices you have regarding our use of, and your ability to correct this information.

Our policy allows you to choose what kind and how much information you provide us and how we use whatever information you give us.

This policy applies to www.bookkeeperexpress.co.nz and not to other companies' or organisations' websites to which bookkeeper express is linked.

INTERNET SECURITY OVERVIEW

A major concern has been just how secure the Internet is, especially when you're sending sensitive information through it. This includes;

• Identification numbers
• Private correspondence
• Personal details
• Sensitive company information
• Bank-account information
• Credit-card information

Information security is provided on computers and over the Internet by a variety of methods. A simple but straightforward security method is to only keep sensitive information on removable storage media. Another form of security is through encryption, the process of encoding information so that only the person (or computer) with the key can decode it.

SECURITY OF YOUR INFORMATION

The back-end technologies employed on this website for your interactions include managed, secure login control, with full MD5 encryption on any password or security related data element, for each client interaction with this website. This technology will provide reliable and secure authentication for every bookkeeper express client that connects through this website.

For more information on internet security, read through the sections below.

ENCRYPTION

Encryption is the process of taking all of the data that one computer is sending to another and encoding it into a form that only the other computer will be able to decode. The encryption used on this website is public-key encryption, which is based on a hash value. The important thing about a hash value is that it is nearly impossible to derive the original input number without knowing the data used to create the hash value.

MD5 is based on 128-bit encryption, which uses a complex algorithm and very large hash values for encryption. A 128-bit number has a possible 2128 or 3,402,823,669,209,384,634,633,746,074,300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 different combinations! This is liken to trying to find one particular grain of sand in the Sahara Desert.

The security that results from the MD5 encryption used on the bookkeeper express website, means we have committed to robust solutions to handle the security and integrity of your data.

You can visit: computer.howstuffworks.com for more information on encryption and internet security.

COLLECTION OF INFORMATION

Information is collected from you primarily to make it easier and more rewarding for you to use our services. Depending on the service you are accessing, you could be asked to provide information such as your name, email address or other information that relates to your online activities. It is entirely your choice whether to respond to these questions or not.

Anonymous Information – The first type of information bookkeeper express collects is anonymous information. For instance, we may collect information to tell us that five thousand people visit this Privacy Policy today, but we do not know their names, where they live or their date of birth - they are 'anonymous' to us.

Personal Information - The second type of information that bookkeeper express collects is personal information. Certain products and services on this website, require you to provide personal information such as your name, business structure, email address, postal address, etc.

We require this information at various stages of your online interactions with us, for example, completing a bookkeeper express questionnaire, so we can provide a variety of personalised and enhanced services that are not available to anonymous users. We hope that you will find it beneficial to provide individually identifiable information about yourself and your business to us because it will make our services more valuable to you.

Sometimes, we may specifically ask for personal information about you when you sign up to use a service. Certain information may be required, such as your name, age, billing address or bank account number in order to provide that service or product to you. This information may also be used to inform you of additional products and services which may interest you.

You can choose not to receive such information when you are undertaking product or service registration on our website.

It is your choice whether to respond.

How much of your personal information that you choose to disclose to bookkeeper express is completely up to you, however the majority of questions in the questionnaire are compulsory. This enables us to assist you in a professional manner and enable informed and beneficial communications with you.

USE OF PERSONAL INFORMATION

bookkeeper express will only use the personal information you have chosen to provide us, for the purposes which you provided it. We will not use it for any other purpose without your consent. The information you provide in the questionnaire will be used for your business purposes, and we may use your response to notify you of other bookkeeper express products and services that may be of benefit to you.

USE OF ANONYMOUS INFORMATION

bookkeeper express automatically gathers anonymous information to monitor the use of our website, like the numbers and frequency of visitors to bookkeeper express and its various pages of interest. We only use such data in the aggregate. This collective data helps us determine how much our prospects, site users and clients use parts of the site, so we can improve bookkeeper express online services. It assures our content is appealing to as many users as possible.

OFFLINE

If you do not wish to place your information on the internet, we offer you the option of emailing or phoning through your information. Please follow the instructions provided

COOKIES

For added convenience, we have employed a "cookie" system for our website. A cookie is a small file that a website sends your computer. It records information necessary for certain website functions, such as remembering your preferences or settings.

This information allows us to make our site easier to use. Cookies allow our servers to keep track of customer details between visits to our site. The information stored by the cookie includes the data that is provided during online registration. This information is only accessible online when a customer enters their username and password. Other information stored by the cookie includes website traffic data. This is not used to identify individual details but only collated into aggregate anonymous results in order to evaluate and improve our online services for our clients.

Credit card information is never stored in the cookie.

If you don't want to accept cookies, you can set your browser and/or firewall to block them. You will still be able to access most bookkeeper express content

If you are interested in finding out more about cookies, how they are used by websites, and how you can change the cookie settings in your browser, you can use the following links:

• cookiecentral.com

• ccsf (City College of San Francisco)
• chami.com

ACCESS AND CORRECTION: PERSONAL DATA

If bookkeeper express holds your personal information we will, where possible provide you with access to the information. bookkeeper express will take reasonable steps to correct the information so that it is accurate, complete and up to date. If your personal information changes, please call bookkeeper express so we may update our database, or email us at be@bookkeeperexpress.co.nz

DISCLOSURE

Your personal information will not be disclosed to any third parties. Disclosure will only be made where it is necessary to fulfil the purpose for which you disclosed your personal information

we do not disclose personal information that you may give us, such as your name, address, email address or telephone number, to any organisation or person outside of bookkeeper express unless you have authorised us to do so.

NO SALE OF PERSONAL INFORMATION

Under no circumstances will bookkeeper express sell or receive payment for licensing or disclosing your personal information.

INTERACTING WITH bookkeeper express ONLINE

When interacting with bookkeeper express, we suggest that you use your discretion and exercise caution when providing your personal information.

Ultimately, you are solely responsible for maintaining the secrecy of your passwords and/or any personal information. Be responsible whenever you are online.

MORE INFORMATION ON INTERNET SECURITY

MD5 ENCRYPTION

[The MD5 algorithm] takes as input a message of arbitrary length and produces as output a 128-bit "fingerprint" or "message digest" of the input. It is conjectured that it is computationally infeasible to produce two messages having the same message digest, or to produce any message having a given pre-specified target message digest. The MD5 algorithm is intended for digital signature applications, where a large file must be "compressed" in a secure manner before being encrypted with a private (secret) key under a public-key cryptosystem such as RSA.

In essence, MD5 is a way to verify data integrity, and is much more reliable than checksum and many other commonly used methods.