Privacy policy
This policy explains how Car Audios handles your information when you use our website, our quote form and our chat. We follow the New Zealand Privacy Act 2020.
What we collect
- Your contact details: name, email address and mobile number.
- Your address or suburb, if you give it, and details about your vehicle (make, model, year) and what you want done.
- Chat transcripts: the text of your messages and the replies.
- Voice calls, if you use them: what you and the assistant say is turned into text and stored as chat lines. We do not store the audio ourselves.
- Emails between our team and you about your quote: the messages, your address and the subject, stored in our back office against your quote request.
- Your IP address, kept only as a keyed hash (a scrambled value we cannot turn back into your address) to limit abuse.
Why we collect it
To prepare your quote, arrange your installation, contact you about it, confirm your email address with a one-time code, and protect our forms and chat from misuse. Giving us your details is optional, but we cannot prepare or arrange a quote without a way to contact you.
Who receives it
- Car Audios.
- The technicians and partners who carry out installations, so they can call you and do the work.
- Google, which provides the AI model that writes the chat replies and, on a voice call, hears your audio.
- Plunk, which sends our emails, including your one-time code and our team’s emails to you, and passes your replies to us. Plunk keeps a contact record for each address it emails and records email events such as when a message was sent or opened.
Overseas processing
Google and Plunk may process your information outside New Zealand. We only share what is needed for them to do their job.
Chat and the AI model
Chats are handled by an automated assistant, not a person. The text you type is sent to Google to generate replies. Google processes it under its API terms. How Google handles that text depends on the terms of the paid Google Cloud project we use, and under those terms Google may keep it for a period. We keep the chat as text only. The assistant does not market to you or send you promotions: it is there to help you with a quote request.
Voice calls
If you start a voice call, your microphone audio is streamed to Google (Gemini) while the call lasts, so the assistant can hear you and answer. Google processes that audio under its API terms for the same paid Google Cloud project, and we cannot tell you how long Google keeps it or what else the terms allow. We do not store the audio ourselves. We keep a transcript of the call as text, stored as chat lines with the rest of your chat.
Emails about your quote
When our team emails you about your quote request, and when you reply, both sides of the conversation are stored in our back office against your quote request, so the team can see the history. Plunk sends these emails and passes your replies to us.
Quote form and one-time codes
Our quote form also emails you a one-time code to confirm your email address before it sends your request. The email contains only the code and a short note.
How long we keep it
Chats where you confirmed your email are deleted 90 days after your last activity in the chat. Sign-ins that were never confirmed are deleted after 48 hours. If a chat led to a quote request, that quote record is separate: the automatic chat clean-up does not delete it, and we keep it until you ask us to delete it. Emails stored against a quote request are kept with that quote record in the same way. Emails we receive that we cannot match to a quote request are deleted after 90 days. Records of the email codes requested through the quote form are deleted after 48 hours.
Your choices
You can ask to see, correct or delete your information at any time, including chats, call transcripts, quote requests and stored emails. Email [email protected] or send us a request through the free quote form. In the chat, the button “End chat and clear my details” ends the chat and clears what is stored in your browser.