Fire & Emergency New Zealand

AMS Privacy Policy

Availability and Messaging System (AMS) Privacy Policy

This is an application that Fire and Emergency New Zealand provides to help local leaders assess how many members of a brigade are available to respond to an emergency call, and how long it is likely to take them to arrive at the station in the event of an emergency incident. 

AMS is made available on an ‘opt in’ basis.  If you agree to use it, you must first download the application and register as a user. 

As part of the registration process and ongoing use of AMS, Fire and Emergency will collect the following personal information about you:

  • your name
  • your address (optional)
  • your mobile phone number (optional)
  • your availability to respond to an emergency call
  • your mobile phone’s location data (if selected, and only while you are responding to your station)

You will be able to update these details in AMS directly.

You can choose whether your mobile phone’s location data is transmitted as part of AMS when you are responding to the station. If you don’t select this option, AMS will let you provide an estimated time of arrival at your station instead. AMS will notify you if you have chosen to share your mobile phone’s location data and does not store or record location data information on your handset.

The personal information we collect through AMS will only be used within AMS and only to enable it to function effectively.  By using your personal information in this way, AMS enables local leaders and fellow brigade members to: 

  • view a list of brigade members responding to an incident
  • communicate with those brigade members
  • have a more informed understanding of who is responding to an incident and how soon the brigade will be able to turn out 

Besides our local leaders and volunteers, information collected or generated through AMS will be shared with:

  • Fire and Emergency’s AMS system administrators
  • Intergen, as the AMS system service provider
  • Microsoft, as the Azure hosting system service provider 

How we collect and use location data in AMS

Location Data collected when responding to an emergency incident

If you opt into using this feature, AMS collects your location data every 15 seconds when responding to an emergency incident. This enables your brigade and the Fire Communications Centres to see how far you are away from the brigade. This information enables faster decision making by brigades and the Fire Communications Centres at the time of an emergency incident in order to provide better community outcomes.
This location data is stored in the Fire and Emergency NZ Microsoft Azure environment and is retained for diagnostic purposes/to improve the performance of AMS. It is not used for any other purpose.

Location Data collected when not responding to an emergency incident

If you opt into using this feature, AMS collects and stores your location data on your device only to determine if you are leaving the immediate response area for your brigade. When your device detects that you are leaving this response area (which is set by your brigade), a notification is displayed on your device. This location data is not transmitted from your device to the AMS servers nor any other party and is not available for diagnostic purposes.

You have the right to ask for a copy of any personal information Fire and Emergency holds about you, and to ask for it to be corrected if you think it is wrong.  If you’d like to ask for a copy of your information, or to have it corrected, please contact us or email us.