Privacy policy

Version 1.3 · Last updated 4 October 2026

What we collect and why

• Account details: your email address and a securely hashed password, so you can log in and see your reports.
• Scan requests: the website address you submit and your confirmation that you have permission to scan it.
• Scan results: for each image found on the website's public pages, its web address, the pages it appears on, its alt text and nearby caption, embedded file details (which can include photographer, credit and copyright fields), our findings and, for full reports, links to matching copies found online.
• Image previews: full reports keep a small preview (up to 240 × 180 pixels) of each image for your PDF report. Free scans keep no previews. Images are otherwise downloaded briefly to read their file details and then discarded.
• Your decisions: the decisions and notes you record against images.
• Monitor: if you subscribe, the website you monitor, your subscription status from Stripe, and the results of each monthly check (the image addresses, file details and web-matching results we use to tell what's new).
• Payments: Stripe processes payments. We receive the payment confirmation, amount, currency and your email; we never see or store your card details.
• Contact messages: your name, email address, organisation (optional), topic and message when you use the contact form, so we can reply. Messages are passed to the IPSQA team by email.
• Abuse prevention: a one-way scrambled (hashed) version of your IP address, stored with free scans to apply the daily free-scan limit.

We use this information to run scans, show and store your reports, take payments, prevent misuse and contact you about your account. We don't sell it, use it for advertising, or use it to train AI models. The website has no analytics or advertising cookies; your login session is kept in your browser's local storage.

People shown or named on scanned websites

Scanned pages and image files can include information about people other than you, such as photographers' names in credit fields, names in captions, or people visible in photos. We collect this from the public pages of the website you ask us to scan, only to show you which images may need review. PixCheckR doesn't use facial recognition and doesn't try to identify people in images. These details are shown only to the account holder who ran the scan. If you think PixCheckR holds information about you from a scanned website, contact us and we'll help.

Who we share information with

• Supabase: account and database hosting, on servers in Frankfurt, Germany, including daily backups.
• Vercel: website hosting. Our application runs in Vercel's Frankfurt region; the website itself is delivered through Vercel's global network, which keeps short-term request logs.
• Stripe: payment processing.
• Google Cloud Vision: for full reports only, each image's web address (or, if Google can't fetch it, the image file) is sent to Google to find matching copies online.
• Resend: sends account emails (such as email confirmation and password resets), Monitor alerts and follow-up emails, and delivers contact form messages to our team.

These providers are based in, or may process information in, countries outside New Zealand, including Germany and the United States. We may also disclose information where the law requires it.

Follow-up emails

If you buy a full report, we may send you up to two emails about PixCheckR Monitor: one about a day after your report and one about two weeks later. We stop if you start monitoring that website. Each email has a one-click unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing doesn't affect your reports, Monitor alerts or account emails. We don't send other marketing and we don't share your email for marketing.

How long we keep it

• Free scans, including the hashed IP address: deleted automatically 90 days after the scan.
• Full report previews: deleted automatically 12 months after the scan.
• Full reports and decisions: kept while your account is open, so you keep your record of review, and deleted when you close your account.
• Contact messages: emailed to our team and deleted from the PixCheckR database automatically after 5 days.
• Payment records: kept in Stripe and our accounting records for 7 years to meet New Zealand tax record-keeping rules.
• Monitor checks: kept for 13 months, except that we always keep your latest check while you're subscribed, because it's what the next check is compared with. When you cancel, your monitor and its checks are deleted 12 months after cancellation.
• Email preferences: kept while your account is open.
• Backups and logs: deleted information can remain in database backups for up to 7 days and in hosting logs for a short period set by the provider.

Security

Information is encrypted in transit. The database can't be read directly from the browser and is accessed only by the PixCheckR service with restricted permissions. Reports can be opened only by the account that ran them and by authorised PixCheckR administrators. If we have a privacy breach, we will follow the notifiable privacy breach requirements of the Privacy Act 2020, including notifying the Privacy Commissioner and affected people where required.

Your rights

You can ask to see or correct the personal information we hold about you, or ask us to delete it or close your account, through our contact form (choose "Privacy request"). We'll respond within 20 working days. If you're not satisfied with our response, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner (privacy.org.nz).

Changes

We'll update this policy when our services or providers change, and show the date of the latest version at the top.