Legal › Privacy › Privacy Births, Deaths and Marriages Online
Information collected
In order to locate the New Zealand birth certificate you wish to order we will request the following information about the individual whose certificate you are ordering:
- full name
- date of birth
- place of birth (if known)
- parents names (if known)
In order to locate the New Zealand marriage or civil union certificate you wish to order we will request the following information about the individuals whose certificate you are ordering:
- each party’s full name before the marriage or civil union
- date of the marriage or civil union
- place of marriage or civil union (if known)
In order to locate the New Zealand death certificate you wish to order we will request the following information about the individual whose certificate you are ordering:
- full name
- date of the death
In order to locate the name change certificate you wish to order we will request the following information about the individual whose certificate you are ordering:
- full name at birth
- current name
- year of name change (approximate)
- place of birth (if known)
- country of birth
In order to confirm your identity against the records held by Births, Deaths, and Marriages we will also collect one of the following sets of information according to your preference:
- your full name at birth, and your date and place of birth; or
- your current full name, your partner’s full name before the marriage and the date and place the marriage occurred; or
- your current full name, your partner’s full name before the civil union and the date and place the civil union occurred; or
- your current full name, your child’s full name, their date and place of birth; or
- your full name at birth, the year in which you had a name change, your current full name, your date of birth and your country of birth if you were born overseas and changed you name in New Zealand
In order to process your order we will collect the following information from you:
- delivery address;
- email address; and
- phone number (optional).
Access to information
If you wish to see or correct your information relating to your order please contact us for further details.Security
The Department will make sure the information you provided is not damaged or shared inappropriately. We take care to ensure that only authorised people are able to view your information.Access Register
The Department keeps an access register, which is a record of who applies for certificates. Your name will be recorded here for any non-historical certificates you order, with the exception of death certificates. You can request a copy of your access register record at any time.Information sharing
We use New Zealand Post for autocompleting New Zealand addresses; and Google Places for autocompleting overseas address. Google may share information about that address publicly and with their partners as detailed within their privacy policy.We will not share the information you provide as part of your certificate order with any other party unless authorised to do so for law enforcement purposes.
Use of Cookies
A cookie is a piece of code that creates a file on your computer to track the pages that you view on our website. Turning off cookies may affect your ability to use all or part of the service. We use session storage to deliver this service to you. Depending on the browser you are using, turning cookies off may impact the use of session storage. The cookies we utilise are optional and relate to collection of statistical information as detailed below.Statistical information collected
The Department may collect statistical information about your visit to our website to help us improve it. This information does not identify individuals and makes use of cookies. We use Universal Analytics by Google to collect and analyse details about the use of our website.The information Universal Analytics collects includes:
- the first three parts of the IP address of the device
- the pages accessed on our site and the links clicked on
- the date and time the site was visited
- the referring site (if any) through which you clicked through to this site
- the operating system (e.g., Windows 7, Mac OSX) on the device used
- the type of web browser used (e.g. Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox)
- other incidental matters such as screen resolution and the language setting used
