Privacy Policy
Last updated: 11 August 2026
This policy covers this website (sumnerd.co.nz), the Tideline NZ app, the Fine Day app, and Plotstead. Short version: the website and the first two apps collect almost nothing, and what little there is stays on your device. Plotstead is the exception, because it syncs between devices and between people, so it has a section of its own further down.
This website
sumnerd.co.nz serves everything it needs from this domain: the fonts, icons, styles and scripts are hosted here, not pulled from a third-party CDN that could log your visit. There are no cookies, no analytics, and no ad trackers. Like any web server, the hosting provider may keep basic connection logs (IP address, request time) as a normal part of serving pages; nobody reviews these for tracking purposes.
Tideline NZ (the app)
There's no account, no sign-up, and no ads. Specifically:
- Location. If you use "locate nearest port", the app reads your device's location to work out which tide station is closest. That calculation happens entirely on your device; your location is never sent anywhere, stored, or logged. If location access fails or is denied, the app falls back to Wellington and carries on.
- Your settings. Things like your launch threshold, pinned locations, and last-viewed port are saved only on your device (standard platform preferences storage), so the app remembers them between launches. This never leaves your phone.
- Tide data sync. The app periodically checks sumnerd.co.nz/tides/ for updated tide predictions: public data sourced from LINZ, not personal data. As with any web request, the server may log your IP address as part of normal operation. Sync only happens when you have a connection, and is throttled to once every 24 hours unless you tap "Sync Now" yourself.
- Sharing. The share button hands text to your device's own share sheet, and you choose where it goes. The app itself doesn't collect or see what you share it to.
- No analytics, no crash reporting, no third-party SDKs. Nothing in the app phones home beyond the tide-data sync described above.
Fine Day (the app)
Same philosophy as Tideline: no account, no ads, no analytics.
- Forecasts. When you pick or search for a location, Fine Day requests the weather forecast for that place through sumnerd.co.nz. The location you asked about is used only to fetch that forecast; it isn't tied to an identity, profile, or advertising ID. Standard server connection logs apply, as above.
- Your settings. Saved locations and preferences stay on your device.
Tide data attribution
Tide data © Land Information New Zealand (LINZ), licensed under CC BY 4.0. The predictions are not official tide tables; see the app's Settings page for the full disclaimer.
Plotstead
Plotstead is the odd one out. It syncs between your devices and with anyone you share a property with, and it has to keep working out the back of a paddock with no signal, so your records live on a server as well as on your phone. That means there is genuinely something to explain here. We don't sell your information and we don't share it with advertisers.
- What we collect, and why. A valid email address and a password are all we need to make you an account. A display name is optional; if you don't give one, we work out a provisional name from your email address so other people on a property see something readable. Everything after that is up to you. Properties, areas, assets, contacts, birthdays, photos, work records and financial entries are all optional, and the app explains why it is asking at the point it asks. It works with as little or as much as you want to put in, though it gets more useful the more it knows. Only people you have invited can see or change your property, and only in the way their role allows.
- Location. Unlike Tideline, location in Plotstead is the whole point, and it is stored. When you drop a pin, walk a pipe run, or import a property boundary, those coordinates are saved with the record and synced along with everything else. Photos usually carry the place they were taken inside the image file itself. We store your photos exactly as you uploaded them, so that stays in them.
- Where your information is stored. Your account details, property records, assets, contacts and financial entries sit in a PostgreSQL database run by Neon in Sydney, Australia. Photos and documents go to Cloudflare R2, which we have set to the Asia-Pacific region. The app itself runs on Microsoft Azure in Sydney. If New Zealand hosting becomes available for these, we intend to move.
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How we protect it.
All traffic between your device and Plotstead is encrypted in
transit using TLS. Your password is stored only as a salted
PBKDF2 hash, so it can be reset but never recovered, by us or
by anybody else. Sign-in tokens, invitations and password
reset links are kept as cryptographic hashes too, which means
a stolen copy of our database still won't open your account.
Data is encrypted at rest by our database and storage providers. Access to your records is checked on our servers on every single request, against your role on that property (owner, editor or viewer), rather than being left to the app on your device to enforce. Links to your photos and documents are issued one at a time and stop working after thirty minutes.
No security is absolute and we won't pretend otherwise. Encryption at rest protects against somebody physically stealing a hard drive. The checks above are the ones doing the work day to day. -
Who else handles your information.
- Neon, database hosting, Sydney
- Microsoft Azure, application hosting, Sydney
- Cloudflare, photo and document storage, Asia-Pacific
- Stripe, payments, United States
- CarJam, vehicle plate lookups, New Zealand
- LINZ, property boundaries and aerial imagery, New Zealand
- Hoopla Hosting, email delivery, New Zealand
- How long we keep it. When you delete something it is marked as deleted straight away and stops appearing in the app. The marker itself has to stay a while, because it is how your other devices, and other people's devices, find out the thing was deleted at all. Somebody whose phone has been out of signal for a month still needs to be told. Marked records are permanently removed six months later.
- Closing your account. What happens depends on who else is on each property, and the app tells you which case applies to each of yours before you confirm anything. A property only you can see is destroyed outright, with its assets, records and financial entries. A property you share is handed to the longest-standing other member, because deleting it would take their records with it. A property belonging to somebody else is simply left, and nothing of theirs is touched. Your account, your sign-in and your own details go in every case.
- Account identifiers. Every account and every record has a unique code in our database. We use those to link your records together and to record who owns what. They are not advertising identifiers, they aren't shared with anyone, and they aren't used to track you anywhere else.
- If something goes wrong. If we ever have a privacy breach likely to cause serious harm, we will tell the people affected and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, as the Privacy Act 2020 requires.
Your rights
You can ask for a copy of your information, or ask us to correct it. We'll come back to you within 20 working days, which is what the Privacy Act allows. For Plotstead you don't have to wait or ask at all: export is built into the app on every plan, including the free one, so your records are never held hostage to a subscription. If you think we've mishandled your information, write to us at:
If you're not happy with how we deal with it, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner at privacy.org.nz.
Changes to this policy
If anything material changes, say an app starts collecting something it didn't before, or we add analytics, this page gets updated and the "last updated" date at the top changes with it.