DroneTrust Wingman Privacy Policy
Version: 2026-09-07
Applies to: the DroneTrust Wingman mobile apps (iOS, Android) and the web portal at app.dronetrust.co.nz
1. Who we are
DroneTrust Limited ("DroneTrust", "we") is a New Zealand Civil Aviation Authority Part 141 certificated training organisation (certificate TR104722). We are the agency responsible for the personal information described here under the New Zealand Privacy Act 2020.
Privacy contact: support@dronetrust.co.nz
2. What this policy covers
DroneTrust Wingman is a compliance tool for remote pilots and for the organisations that oversee them. It holds the training credentials, flight planning, flight logging, occurrence reporting and organisational oversight records that a pilot or a UAOC operator needs to keep. This policy explains what the app collects, why, who else sees it, and what you can do about it.
It does not cover the DroneTrust marketing website, our course platform, or any DroneTrust service you use outside the app. Those carry their own notices.
3. What we collect
We collect only what the compliance record requires. Nothing in the app is collected for advertising.
Information you give us
| Category | Examples |
|---|---|
| Account and identity | Full name, preferred name, email address, phone number, date of birth, street address (line 1, city, region), your CAA pilot certificate number, examiner number where you hold one, profile photo |
| Sign-in | Password (stored only as a hash by our authentication provider), and the fact and time of each sign-in |
| Training and credentials | Certificates and ratings held, issue and expiry dates, supporting documents you upload, course enrolments and lesson progress, provisional rating progress |
| Flight test and assessment | Booking requests (name, email, phone, aircraft make and model, preferred date, region and location), and, where an examiner assesses you, your date of birth, the type and number of the photo identification you present, assessment results, examiner comments and your signature |
| Operational records | Pre-flight plans (site name and coordinates, hazards, risk scores, controls, airspace and weather notes), flight logs (coordinates, dates and times, duration, maximum altitude and distance, purpose, aircraft, notes), occurrence reports (what happened, coordinates, severity, injuries, property damage, immediate actions and CAA notification status), Form 005 operation notifications, and your personal risk register |
| Aircraft | Make, model, nickname, serial number, weight, insurance reference, purchase and service dates, photos and maintenance records |
| Organisation and UAOC | Membership of an organisation and your role in it, UAOC applications, exposition and operations specification documents, invitations and join requests |
| Communications | Posts, comments and likes on the in-app feed, messages with an examiner, your support conversations with Skye (our in-app assistant), and your notification preferences |
| Documents | Any PDF or image you attach as evidence, and the file's name, type and size |
Information collected automatically
| Category | Detail |
|---|---|
| Location | Precise device coordinates, only when you tap a control such as "Use my location" or "Fetch current weather", to prefill an operation site or the conditions at it. Location is requested in the foreground only. The app never collects location in the background and never tracks you between sessions. |
| Address lookup | When you type your street address during onboarding, the text typed so far is sent to a third-party geocoder (Photon, operated by komoot) so the app can suggest matching New Zealand addresses. Only the typed text is sent, never your name or account, and the search is limited to New Zealand. |
| Device and connectivity | Whether the device is online, so the app can queue work while you have no signal. The app checks for over-the-air updates on launch through Expo/EAS Update, which tells that provider your app version and platform. |
| Security | A hashed form of your IP address is recorded against in-app assistant activity to enforce rate limits and detect abuse. We do not store the address itself. |
| Crash diagnostics | When the app crashes or a request fails, we send the error message, the stack trace, the app version, your account id and a short trail of the app events leading up to the failure (for example which step of the flight-plan wizard you were on, how many items were waiting to sync, or that you had just signed in) to our error-reporting provider so we can fix it. The trail carries step names, counts and yes/no values only. We deliberately do not send the contents of the screen you were on: no request or form bodies, no coordinates, no names, dates of birth, identity-document details or occurrence details, no screenshots, and no session replay. |
What we do not collect
No advertising identifiers. No analytics or product-usage tracking. No session replay, no screenshots and no performance tracing. No cross-app or cross-site tracking, and no data is shared with data brokers. The app contains no advertising SDKs. Crash diagnostics are the one exception and are described above: they carry the shape of a failure and your account id, never the record you were working on.
4. Why we use it
- To give you an account and let you sign in.
- To create, store and export the compliance records you make: certificates, flight plans, flight logs, occurrences, Form 005 packs, aircraft and maintenance records.
- To let an organisation you belong to exercise its oversight duties, and an examiner assess and certify you.
- To notify you about things that matter to your compliance, such as an expiring certificate.
- To answer support questions, in the app or by email.
- To keep records that aviation rules, safety obligations, contracts, audits or disputes require us to keep.
- To keep the service secure, and to investigate misuse.
We do not sell personal information. We do not use it for advertising, and we do not profile you for marketing based on your operational records.
5. Automated and AI features
The in-app assistant (Skye) answers questions about your own records. When you send it a message, the message and the records it retrieves on your behalf are sent to our AI provider (Anthropic; OpenAI where the successor assistant is enabled for you) to generate the reply. The assistant can only read what you can read: it runs entirely under your own permissions.
Our AI providers process this content to return a response and do not use it to train their models.
We keep a trace of each assistant conversation (your messages, the assistant's replies and the records it retrieved) in an observability service (Langfuse) so we can check the assistant's answers for accuracy and safety and investigate a complaint. Traces are tagged with your account id, are visible only to DroneTrust staff, and are deleted when your account is deleted.
The assistant may keep short notes about your stated training goals and preferences so it does not have to ask twice. You can see those notes by asking it, and they are deleted when your account is deleted.
Nothing in the app makes an automated decision that has a legal or similarly significant effect on you. Certification, assessment and approval decisions are made by people.
6. Who else sees your information
Within the app
- Your organisation. If you are a member of a UAOC organisation, its prime person, chief pilot and fleet administrators can see the flight plans, flight logs and occurrences you file under that organisation, and your certificate status. They cannot see records you file outside it.
- Examiners. An examiner assessing you sees your assessment, your booking and the operational evidence relevant to the assessment.
- DroneTrust staff. Administrators can see accounts and records to run the service, review UAOC applications and provide support.
Publicly
- Certificate verification. Each certificate has a verification page reachable by a unique link, which shows the holder's name, CAA number, certificate type and status so a client or regulator can confirm it is genuine. Only someone holding the link can open it.
- Profile photos. A profile photo you upload is stored so it can appear on that verification page, and is readable by anyone with its URL. Remove it in Account settings at any time.
- Share links. When you choose to share a record, we mint a link that expires after 7 days. Anyone holding the link can open that record until it expires.
Service providers
We use the following processors. Each acts on our instructions.
| Provider | What they process | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Supabase | Database, authentication, file storage, backups: all of the above | Australia (Sydney) |
| Vercel | Hosting for the web portal and the assistant service | United States |
| Expo/EAS Update | Over-the-air app updates (app version, platform) | United States |
| Anthropic | In-app assistant messages and the records they retrieve | United States |
| OpenAI | The successor assistant, where enabled | United States |
| Langfuse | Assistant conversation traces: messages, replies, retrieved records, account id | Japan |
| Klaviyo | Notification and reminder email: your name, email address, phone number and the event that triggered the message | United States |
| Sentry | Crash diagnostics: error message, stack trace, app version, account id, event trail | United States |
| Photon (komoot) | The address text you type during onboarding, to suggest a matching address | Germany |
| MetService (MetOcean) or Open-Meteo | Coordinates only, sent from our server to return weather for a site. No identity is sent | New Zealand / European Union |
| Course platform (Moodle) | Your email address, to sign you in to a course, and your enrolment and completion records | As operated by DroneTrust |
| Zoho | Our customer records system. DroneTrust staff record enrolments, bookings and certificate details there. The app does not send information to it automatically | International |
We also disclose information where the law requires it, where safety or an aviation authority obligation requires it, and to our professional advisers under confidentiality.
7. Where your information is held
Our production database, authentication and file storage sit in Supabase's Australian region (ap-southeast-2, Sydney). Other providers listed above hold information in the United States, Japan, Germany, the European Union or New Zealand as noted.
This means personal information is disclosed outside New Zealand. Before disclosing it we satisfy ourselves under Information Privacy Principle 12 that the recipient is subject to comparable safeguards, through the contract we hold with them.
8. Security
Traffic between the app and our services is encrypted in transit (HTTPS/TLS); the Android build disallows cleartext traffic entirely. Data at rest is encrypted by our platform provider. Access to your records is enforced in the database itself by row-level security, not merely in the app, so a record you cannot see is one the database will not return.
On your device, the mobile app stores your sign-in session in the operating system's secure store (iOS Keychain, Android Keystore) with an additional encryption layer. It also holds cached portal query data and any unsent work, so you can keep working without signal: flight logs, flight plans, Form 005 packs and occurrence reports written offline show as queued for sync until the app reconnects and sends them. Signing out clears the session. On the web, your session is kept in your browser's storage so you stay signed in between visits; signing out, or clearing the browser's site data, removes it.
No system is perfectly secure. If a privacy breach occurs that is likely to cause serious harm, we will notify the Office of the Privacy Commissioner and affected people as the Privacy Act 2020 requires.
9. How long we keep it
Aviation records are evidence, and both the rules and our customers' audits require them to survive an account closing.
- Operational and training evidence (certificates, flight logs, flight plans, occurrences, Form 005 records, assessments, aircraft maintenance) is kept for as long as aviation, safety, contractual, audit or business-record obligations require.
- Identity snapshots are written onto those records at the time you file them (your name and CAA number as they were), so the record stays meaningful after your profile is removed.
- Account and contact details are removed or anonymised when they are no longer needed.
- Assistant conversations, notes and traces are held against your account and deleted with it.
- Share links expire after 7 days. Links that open a single document for viewing expire within minutes.
- Security and audit logs are kept for as long as needed to investigate misuse and to evidence who changed what.
10. Deleting your account
You can request deletion in the app: Account, then Delete account. You do not need to email anyone, and you can request it from the web portal at app.dronetrust.co.nz without installing the app.
Deletion is a reviewed process, not an instant wipe. When you request it we:
- give you a reference number and record the request;
- disable your access;
- remove or anonymise your profile and contact details;
- delete your assistant conversations, notes and traces;
- retain the regulated evidence described in section 9, detached from your contact details.
If you want to know exactly what would be retained in your case, ask us before you request deletion.
11. Your rights
Under the Privacy Act 2020 you can:
- ask for a copy of the personal information we hold about you;
- ask us to correct it if it is wrong, or attach a statement of correction if we disagree;
- withdraw consent to optional processing, such as turning off location or notification email;
- complain, first to us at support@dronetrust.co.nz, and then to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner (privacy.org.nz, 0800 803 909) if you are not satisfied.
Most of your information is visible and editable in the app already. We will respond to a request within 20 working days.
12. Children
DroneTrust Wingman is built for certificated and training remote pilots and is not directed at children. You must be at least 16 to hold an account. Where a student under 18 trains with us, their account is created with the involvement of a parent, guardian or their training organisation, and we collect no more than the certification record requires.
13. Changes
We will post any change on this page and raise the version at the top. Where a change materially affects how we handle your information, the app will ask you to read and accept the new version before you continue. We record which version you accepted and when.
14. Contact
DroneTrust Limited
support@dronetrust.co.nz
dronetrust.co.nz/pages/dronetrust-wingman-privacy-policy