When the Harmful Digital Communications Act (HDCA) passed in June of this year, it brought some changes to the Privacy Act. One of these changes was to section 56, which previously excluded personal, family and household affairs from coverage by the Privacy Act. The effect is that we can now investigate cases stemming from domestic affairs, where the subject matter would be “highly offensive to an ordinary reasonable person”.

A Supreme Court decision released this week is significant in its finding that a digital file can be considered to be property.

What do you get when you gather members of the public to discuss and debate highly offensive material? We did exactly that the other week, and the end result was a good helping of common sense.

It’s not just privacy regulators and businesses that play an important role in privacy and data protection. Intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) also make an important contribution through their information handling rules, policies or practices.

After five years of negotiations, government ministers from the 12 Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) countries - New Zealand and  Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, Singapore, United States, and Vietnam - announced their conclusions this week.

Talking to people about how their personal information is collected, kept, used, and disclosed, and the impact it can have when something goes wrong, has put privacy in a new perspective for me – especially now that I deal with privacy matters every day.

The GCSB does not undertake mass surveillance of New Zealanders. It was a message that the acting head of New Zealand’s foreign intelligence agency, Una Jagose, reiterated in Wellington this week, as well revealing details about the Bureau’s cyber-security work.