Your wool, your data, your call.

Two ideas run through everything below. Nothing is public unless you make it public. And where a number has to be checked but shouldn’t be published — a mill’s blend, a farm’s weights — we verify it privately and publish only the outcome.

01Who we are

WoolPass™ is operated by WoolTrace NZ Limited. In New Zealand privacy law we are the agency responsible for the personal information described here; under the GDPR, where it applies to people in the EU or UK, we are the controller.

Questions, requests and complaints about privacy go to contact@woolpass.com. A person is always available to answer — this is not an automated inbox.

02What we collect

Only what the job needs. There is no advertising on WoolPass, no tracking pixels, and no profiles built for anyone else’s benefit.

Location

The app asks for your location when you capture evidence, and stamps it against that record. You can refuse; the capture still works, and the record simply carries less corroboration. We do not track your location in the background, and we never collect it when the app is closed.

A note on photo metadata

Photographs uploaded from a gallery often carry their own embedded date and location. We record what is there for the audit trail, but we never treat it as proof — that data is trivially editable. Only the time and place our own app stamps at the shutter counts as evidence.

03Who can see it

Two separate questions have to be answered before anyone sees anything, and one never stands in for the other:

Did you agree to share it?

That permission belongs to you, is asked for explicitly, and can be withdrawn.

Is the person asking entitled to see it?

That depends on who they are and what they have subscribed to.

Both must pass. A subscriber still cannot see the details of a grower who never agreed to share them, and a consenting grower’s details are still not shown to someone with no entitlement.

What you are actually asked

• Your public profile — your name and region on public pages such as a bale passport.
• Sharing with buyers — your details may go to a potential buyer.
• Sharing with carriers — and to transport and shipping companies, for logistics.
• Demand sharing — if you are a buyer, whether your requirement may be shown to suppliers.

Each is a separate choice, recorded with its date, and changeable at any time. Silence is never consent: anything you have not agreed to is treated as declined.

What we never do

• We do not sell your information. Not to anyone, at any price.
• We do not use it to train third-party AI models.
• We do not publish your name, your farm or your business without your say-so.
• We do not show one supplier the identity of another supplier in the same lot just because their wool is in it.

04How AI is used, and where it stops

WoolPass uses AI in two clearly separated ways, and it matters which is which.

• Reading. AI reads your photographs and documents and suggests what they say — a weight off a bale label, an issuer off a certificate, a draft of your story in your own words. Every suggestion is marked as a suggestion. You review, edit and approve before anything is recorded as fact or published.
• Checking. Separately, a scoring engine tests claims against evidence — does the arithmetic hold, do two parties agree, is the certificate current. That engine only ever sees the facts it needs to run a check.

Content you submit is processed by our AI providers under contract, solely to give you the result. It is not used to train their public models. No decision that materially affects you is made by AI alone: a score is a measure of how much evidence supports a claim, it is shown with the reasons behind it, and you can challenge it.

05Where it lives, and for how long

Your data is stored in Amazon Web Services’ Sydney region (ap-southeast-2), encrypted in transit and at rest. Access inside WoolPass is limited to the people who need it to run the service, and administrative access is logged.

Some processing necessarily happens outside Australia and New Zealand — our AI providers, our email sender. Those transfers are covered by contract, and only the data needed for that task is sent.

The record is permanent. Your presence in it is not.

This is the one part of this policy that differs from most, so it is worth being plain about it.

Provenance records are kept. A bale, its weights, the lot it went into, what was scoured and combed and by whom — these are a ledger, not a file about you, and a ledger that can be edited afterwards proves nothing. If a claim's evidence could quietly disappear once it became inconvenient, no buyer would be right to rely on any of it. So the chain stays.

You can still step out of it. The accountable party in WoolPass is an organisation, not the individual holding the phone — so your personal identifiers can be removed from records that stay. Ask, and the chain continues to say “this scourer recorded 759.9 kg on this date” while your name comes off it.

• Your account and profile — deleted when you close your account.
• Your name against records you made — removed on request; the record itself remains, attributed to the organisation.
• Provenance records — bales, transport, processing, evidence, test results. Kept. They are the thing being proven.
• Technical logs — a short operational window, then discarded.

06Your rights

Under the Privacy Act 2020 (New Zealand), and under the GDPR where it applies to you, you can:

• See what we hold about you, and get a copy.
• Correct it if it is wrong. Much of this you can do yourself in the app.
• Withdraw a consent at any time, in Settings. Withdrawal stops future sharing; it cannot unsend what was already shared.
• Ask us to delete your account and personal information, and to take your name off records that stay. What we will not do is delete the provenance ledger itself — see §05, and ask us if that affects you.
• Object or complain. Write to us first — we would rather fix it. If you are not satisfied, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner at privacy.org.nz, or to your local supervisory authority in the EU or UK.

Email contact@woolpass.com. We aim to answer within a few working days and, where the law sets a deadline, always within it.

07Cookies

The app sets one cookie, so that you stay signed in. There are no advertising cookies, no third-party trackers and no cross-site profiling — which is also why there is no cookie banner to dismiss.

08Security

Passwords are stored only as one-way hashes; nobody at WoolPass can read yours. Traffic is encrypted. Uploaded evidence is fingerprinted when it arrives, so a file cannot be quietly swapped for a different one later. Credentials are held in a managed secrets service, never in our code.

No system is perfect. If a breach affects you, we will tell you and the Privacy Commissioner promptly, and say what we are doing about it.

09Children

WoolPass is a business tool and is not intended for children. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 16.

10Changes to this policy

If we change how we handle your information in a way that matters, we will say so here and tell account holders directly — not quietly update a date. The date at the top of this page always reflects the current version.