Privacy Policy

Last updated: 18 October 2026

1. Who We Are

Silicon Hub is operated by Silicon Homes Ltd (“we”, “us”). This policy explains what personal information we collect through the Service, why, and what your rights are under the New Zealand Privacy Act 2020. Contact: info@siliconhub.co.nz.

2. Information We Collect

Account information: name, email address, phone number, and role, for you and anyone your Account Owner invites.
Content you enter: project, cost, vendor, schedule, and related business information you or your invited users add to the Service (“Your Content”) — this may include personal information about your own clients, vendors, or staff that you choose to enter.
Unless your Account Owner turns this off (see Section 5 below, Settings → People): your project's Region, Build Type, and Build Size, and pooled cost figures derived from Your Content, contributed to the Platform Benchmark — never Your Content itself, and never anything identifying which Account or project a figure came from.
Billing information: handled directly by our payment processor, Stripe — we do not receive or store your full card details ourselves.
Usage and log information: basic technical information (such as login times and error logs) used to operate and troubleshoot the Service.
Site photos, videos, and documents you upload, along with any caption, date, and construction stage you record against them — and, where your device supplies one, the GPS coordinates of the place a photo was taken.

2.1 The Silicon Hub mobile app

The iPhone and iPad app asks your permission before using any of the following. Each one is optional, the app works without them, and you can change your mind at any time in iOS Settings.

Camera, photo library, and microphone — to take and attach site photos and videos. Audio is only ever captured as part of a video you choose to record.
Location while using the app — to record where a site photo was taken, so progress photos show their location on the project, and to recognise which of your sites you have arrived at so the app can offer to switch to the right project.
Location always (Site arrival) — off unless you switch it on under Settings → Notifications in the app. With it on, your device notices when you come within 200 metres of one of your own sites and shows a notification offering to switch to that project and open today’s log.
Notifications — to deliver the reminders you have turned on, such as booked-inspection and daily-log reminders.

How a notification reaches your phone. Push notifications are delivered by the platform's own messaging service — Apple's Push Notification service on iPhone and iPad, and Google's Firebase Cloud Messaging on Android. To deliver one, we send that service a token identifying your device together with the text of the notification itself, which may include a project name and a figure (for example, “This week — 6 Hillside Road”). Neither service is given access to your Account, your login, or Your Content, and neither is used to track you or to target advertising at you. Turning notifications off on your device stops this entirely.

Site arrival is worked out entirely on your own device. Your device’s location is never sent to us: we do not receive, store, or have any means of seeing where your phone is or has been, and no record of your movements exists on the Service. The only location information that reaches us is the coordinates saved onto a site photo you choose to upload.

2.2 Our public website

Our public pages — the welcome page, the features page, the sign-up page, and the short confirmation page shown after a subscription payment — use Google Analytics, Google Ads and the Meta (Facebook) Pixel, so that we can see how many people visit, which pages they read, and which of our advertisements actually bring someone to us. These services set cookies in your browser and receive your IP address, your device and browser type, and which of those pages you viewed.

What we send them is deliberately limited to four things: that a page was viewed, that a “Start free trial” button was clicked, that a trial account was created, and that a subscription was paid for — the last of these including which plan was chosen, but not the amount paid. We do not send them your name, your email address, your phone number, your company name, or anything you enter into the Service.

None of this runs inside Silicon Hub itself. There is no Google Analytics, no advertising pixel, and no third-party analytics or advertising service of any kind anywhere in the app once you are signed in, or in the iPhone and Android apps. It applies only to the public pages listed above.

You can opt out through your browser's cookie settings, with Google's Analytics opt-out add-on, or in your Google and Meta ad preferences. Opting out has no effect on your use of the Service.

3. How We Use It

To provide, maintain, and support the Service for your Account.
To show where a site photo was taken, and to offer you the right project when you arrive at one of your sites.
To send the reminders and notifications you have turned on.
To process subscription payments via Stripe.
To measure how our public web pages and advertisements perform, as described in Section 2.2.
To respond to support requests you send us.
To meet legal, tax, or regulatory obligations.

We do not use Your Content to train any third-party AI model, and we do not sell personal information to anyone.

4. Who We Share It With

Stripe, to process your subscription payment.
Apple and Google, only to deliver the push notifications you have turned on to your own device — see Section 2.1.
Google and Meta, for website analytics and advertising measurement on our public marketing pages only, and never including Your Content — see Section 2.2.
Our hosting provider, solely to store and run the Service.
Anthropic (Claude), only where Claude report summaries are switched on for your Account: a council inspection report attached to an inspection is sent to Anthropic to write that inspection’s Report summary. Anthropic does not use this data to train its models.
Other Accounts on the Service, only as an anonymised, aggregated statistic, and only if your Account Owner hasn't turned this off under Settings → People (see Section 5 below).
No one else, except where required by law or with your explicit consent.

5. Platform Benchmark (Anonymised, On by Default)

On by default for every Account, including Accounts that existed before this feature launched. Your Account Owner can turn it off at any time under Settings → People, with no effect on anything else about your subscription or access.

Unless your Account Owner turns this off, we pool cost figures from Your Content with figures from other participating Accounts, grouped by Region (e.g. Auckland / Rest of NZ), Build Type (e.g. Standalone / Terraced & Multi-unit), and Build Size (per-lot floor area band), to produce averaged $/m² figures other Accounts can compare their own numbers against, and yours against theirs.

We limit what this feature can ever expose in two specific ways:

Aggregate only. The Service only ever computes and stores pooled sums and averages. It does not create, and does not have a feature to create, a report of any individual Account's or project's own figures for another Account to view.
Minimum sample size. A figure for a given Region, Build Type, Build Size, and cost category only appears at all once at least a set minimum number of different Accounts (currently 2, and reviewed as more Accounts join the platform) have contributed data to it. Below that threshold, the figure is left out of the aggregate entirely, not shown as an approximate or unreliable number, so that a small pool can't be used to infer what a specific Account's own figures are. A lower minimum gives a thinner anonymity guarantee than a higher one would — we intend to raise it as participation grows.

We consider this a strong practical safeguard, not an absolute mathematical guarantee — we are not aware of a realistic way to reverse-engineer an individual Account's figures from this aggregate, but a determined party who already holds detailed outside knowledge about the market could, in principle, narrow down a range, and that risk is somewhat higher while the minimum sample size above is small. We will keep improving these protections and revisiting that minimum as we identify ways to do so.

Turning this off stops future contributions from your Account; it does not retroactively remove your figures from aggregates already computed before you turned it off. Data from an Account is only ever used in this aggregate while that Account has not turned this off.

6. Our Commitment on Accessing Your Data

This is the section customers tend to care about most — written to match the actual technical design of the Service, not just a general promise.

Each customer's Account is kept structurally separate within the Service, and there is no feature in the Service that lets us — or any other customer — casually browse another Account's data.

We do not access or view Your Content except in one of these situations:

You've explicitly asked us to, for a specific support request;
Where required by law, or to investigate a genuine security incident affecting the Service.

7. Backups

We take automated, encrypted backups of each Account's data on a daily schedule and store them separately from our primary hosting environment, in restricted-access cloud storage controlled by us. Backups are encrypted before they leave our server and are retained on a rolling 30-day cycle, after which they are deleted. They are used only to restore data in the event of loss, and are not reviewed as part of normal operations.

Backups cover project records and user accounts. File attachments are not duplicated into our backups, because they already reside permanently in your own connected OneDrive account.

You can also export a full copy of your own data at any time from Settings → Backup & Restore, and we recommend keeping your own copies.

8. How Long We Keep Your Information

While your subscription is active, we retain Your Content for as long as your Account exists. After cancellation, we retain Your Content for 7 years, reflecting typical record-keeping needs for construction and building-related records (including the Building Act 2004's long-stop limitation period for defect claims), after which it is securely deleted.

You can ask us to delete your personal information sooner; we will do so unless we have a legitimate legal, regulatory, or dispute-related reason to keep specific records, in which case we'll explain what's retained and why.

9. Your Rights

Under the Privacy Act 2020, you have the right to ask what personal information we hold about you, to ask us to correct it, and, subject to Sections 7 and 8 above, to ask us to delete it. Contact info@siliconhub.co.nz to make a request.

10. Data Breach Notification

If a privacy breach occurs that we reasonably believe has caused, or is likely to cause, serious harm, we will notify the Office of the Privacy Commissioner and affected individuals as required under the Privacy Act 2020.

11. Overseas Storage & Processing

Some service providers we use (for example, Stripe, the notification services described in Section 2.1, the Google and Meta services described in Section 2.2, and Anthropic as described in Section 4) may store or process information outside New Zealand. Where this happens, we take reasonable steps to ensure comparable privacy protections apply.

12. Children

The Service is intended for use by businesses and professionals and is not directed at, or intended for use by, children.

13. Changes to This Policy

We may update this policy from time to time and will note the “last updated” date above. Material changes will be communicated by email or an in-app notice.

14. Contact & Complaints

Questions or concerns about this policy: info@siliconhub.co.nz. You may also make a complaint to the New Zealand Office of the Privacy Commissioner at privacy.org.nz.