Privacy Notice | Stay Useful

Who is responsible

Avenir AI Limited, trading as Stay Useful, is the agency responsible for personal information collected through stayuseful.co.nz. This notice is written to meet the information privacy principles in the Privacy Act 2020.

Privacy contact: Privacy Officer, Avenir AI Limited, privacy@stayuseful.co.nz.

The short version

The assessment needs no account, no name and no email. You can take it and see your score without giving us anything.
An email address is collected only if you ask for your report, or if you buy the kit.
Marketing consent is a separate, unticked box. Refusing it does not affect your report or your purchase.
We never see or store your card details. Stripe handles payment.
If you earn the credential, the name you choose and the issue date appear on a public verification page. You are shown exactly that, and choose whether to go ahead, before the page exists.
We do not sell personal information, and we do not run advertising trackers.

What is collected, and why

We do not collect a phone number, a date of birth, a job title, or any demographic information at any point. We do not ask for your name anywhere except on the credential, where you choose it and choose whether to publish it.

Information	Why it is collected
Your assessment answers, as option identifiers	To calculate your score on the server with the same deterministic method the page used, and to build the report you asked for. Answer identifiers only. The optional role title and the optional free-text question are never sent to us and never stored.
Your email address, if you request the report	To send you the report. Nothing else. It is stored with the delivery record so we can tell whether the message was accepted and retry if it was not.
Your marketing decision, whether yes or no	To prove you were asked, what wording you saw, and when you decided. A refusal is recorded as deliberately as a consent, because a missing record proves nothing.
Your email address and address, if you buy	To create the order, deliver the download, and issue a receipt. Stripe collects a billing address and, at launch, an address used only to confirm you are buying from New Zealand. Nothing is posted to you. Stripe holds that address as part of the payment record; we store the country only, as a coarse indicator on the download log.
Payment status and tax information from Stripe	To record the sale, the GST included, and any refund or dispute. Required for tax records.
A keyed hash of your email address	To find your order and to rate-limit abuse without keeping a searchable list of who has visited.
Download records	The entitlement, the file, the size, and whether the request came from New Zealand. Not your address, and not a full location.
Anonymous traffic and funnel events	To understand whether a visit reaches the assessment, product, checkout and purchase. Events use a random identifier for the current browser tab, coarse mobile or desktop class, route and bounded campaign labels. No IP address, email, assessment answer or access token is stored in analytics.
The name you choose for your credential, if you claim one	To display on your credential and on its public verification page. You type it yourself, you are shown what the public page will say before it exists, and nothing else about you appears there. Your completion-check score is stored with the record and is never published.

What we never collect or store

Card numbers, expiry dates or security codes. Payment happens on Stripe-hosted pages and card details never reach our systems.
Passwords. There are no accounts.
The text of your report. It is rebuilt from your stored answers when it is sent, and never kept as a document.
Your answers to the optional free-text question, or an optional role title. These stay in your browser.

Who processes it, and where

Stay Useful is a small operation and uses three providers. Each of them may process information outside New Zealand, which the Privacy Act permits where comparable safeguards apply. We rely on each provider's contractual data protection terms.

Provider	What it does, and where
Cloudflare	Hosts the site and the API, stores the database and the product files, and provides bot protection. Data is stored in Cloudflare's network, with a placement preference for Oceania. That is a preference, not a guarantee of New Zealand residency.
Stripe	Takes the payment and issues the receipt. Stripe is the controller of the card data it collects and processes it under its own privacy policy, largely in the United States.
Resend	Sends the report email and the download email. It receives the recipient address and the message, and processes it in the United States and Europe.

How long it is kept

These are operational periods, chosen and stated rather than left vague. Tax and order records are kept because the law requires it; everything else is kept only as long as it has a use.

Record	Kept for
Order, payment, GST and refund records	Seven years from the end of the tax year, as required for New Zealand business records. This is the one period we cannot shorten on request.
Your entitlement to the version you bought	Kept for as long as the entitlement exists, so we can reissue your download if you lose the email. Delete it on request, and you lose access to the files.
Report delivery records and the email address in them	12 months, then deleted. Long enough to answer "I never received it", not long enough to become a mailing list.
Assessment answers	12 months, alongside the delivery record they belong to. Deleted with it.
Marketing consent records	While consent stands, and for 24 months after it is withdrawn, so we can show we honoured the withdrawal.
Abuse-prevention counters	Rolling windows of an hour. Keyed hashes only, never addresses.
Download records	12 months.
Anonymous traffic and funnel events	90 days. The random tab identifier is not reused across tabs or devices.
Your credential, if you earn one	Kept while the credential stands, because its whole purpose is that somebody can still check it years later. Ask us to delete it and we will, and the verification page then stops resolving.

Your credential, if you earn one

Completing the Stay Useful AI Work Kit lets you claim a credential. Claiming one is a choice, and it is the only part of Stay Useful that publishes anything.

You choose the name that is displayed. Before the credential is created you are shown exactly what its public page will say.
That page shows the name you chose, the issue date, the credential id and whether the credential is valid. Nothing else.
It never shows your email address, your purchase, your payment, your assessment answers, or anything you wrote in your workbook. None of that is sent to that page and none of it is published anywhere.
The page is not listed anywhere and asks search engines not to index it, so it works for somebody you give the link to without becoming a searchable directory of customers. There is no directory of credential holders.
Your completion-check score is kept with the record so we can show the credential was earned. It is never published.
Ask us to delete your credential and we will. Write to privacy@stayuseful.co.nz from the address you bought with. The verification page then stops resolving, so anyone you gave the link to will see that no credential matches it.

Your rights

We aim to answer within five working days, and the Privacy Act allows up to 20.

Ask what we hold about you, and get a copy. Write to privacy@stayuseful.co.nz from the address you used.
Ask us to correct anything that is wrong.
Ask us to delete what we hold. We will, except for order and tax records we are required to keep, and we will tell you exactly what we kept and why.
Withdraw marketing consent at any time, using the link in any marketing email or by writing to us. Withdrawal never affects your report or your purchase.
Complain to us first, and to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner if you are not satisfied.

Security

Everything is served over HTTPS, with a content security policy and strict transport security.
Access to your download is a random 32-byte token. We store only its hash, so the database cannot be used to download anything.
Email addresses used for lookup are hashed with a server-held key.
A credential belongs to a purchase, not to a password. Only a browser holding a valid entitlement link can start the credential flow, and the credential ids are random rather than sequential, so one cannot be used to find another.
Card data never reaches our systems.
No perfect security exists, and we do not claim it.

Cookies and analytics

There is no advertising tracker and no cross-site profiling. One cookie is set, after you open your download link: a short-lived, HttpOnly entitlement cookie that proves you may download the files. It expires within the hour.

The assessment saves your progress in your own browser, for 24 hours, so you do not lose it on a refresh. It holds answer identifiers and a timestamp, never an email address or a consent choice, and it never leaves your device until you submit.

Traffic measurement is first-party and cookie-free. A random identifier in session storage joins events only within the current browser tab; it is not a person or cross-device identifier. Campaign labels, route and coarse mobile or desktop class may be recorded for 90 days. No email address, IP address, assessment answer, report content or access token ever enters analytics.

Changes

If this notice changes materially we will update the date at the top. This version is dated 4 September 2026.