Last year, we launched ‘Making the Future’, our technology strategy. One of the key goals we set for ourselves was to make privacy easy for business. When we talked to people about the strategy last year, they asked for simple tools. Today, we’re launching the first of these – Priv-o-matic.

Priv-o-matic is built to help generate ‘principle 3’ statements. These are minimal compliance statements that you need to show people when you collect their personal information. It’s available here.

You might notice that it doesn’t generate the fully fledged privacy policy you often see used on websites. That’s not what principle 3 is about. Principle 3 statements let customers know clearly, and in plain English, what’s going on with their information.

We’ve tried to build it to be a one size that fits all - but the nuances of privacy means that there might be fishhooks for some of you and we want to hear about them.

This is going to be an iterative process for us, and we want to continually update the tool to ensure it’s helpful to New Zealand businesses.

A Wellington-based technology company, Rabid, helped us build the tool - and we’ve had a great time working through the development process with them. It’s been refreshing to try and approach privacy afresh, and the process has taught us a lot.

The tool also marks our first foray into open source development. The code for the Priv-o-matic is up on Github, so if you’re into that side of things, you’ll be able to fork it, tweak it, remix it. Or if you’re really nice - help us make it better. You’ll also be able to see when we update it and why.

IPP3 - what to tell an individual