This is the first in what will become a series of blog posts on the new Privacy Act, the changes, and what we’ll be doing to implement those law changes.

We’ll try and cover all the key changes in the law and give readers a clear view on any areas they will need to address.

This is the place to come to keep up to date with Privacy 2020. Let us know if there are topics you particularly want us to cover, and we’ll do our best to prioritise those. Email us at comms@privacy.org.nz.

At the time of writing, the Privacy Bill was being prepared for its third reading in the House. We expect the Bill to pass in the first quarter of 2020 with a commencement date six months later.

The new Act will have a range of new enforcement tools. We’ll outline those in coming posts.

One thing the new law will also give the Privacy Commissioner is a greater ability to say to complainants, “Sorry, that may be a concern, but this is not something we can take on.” We’ve found over the years that there are issues that people bring to us that we cannot realistically help them with. For instance, it may have happened a long time ago. The new Act clarifies the grounds under which the Commissioner may decline to investigate a complaint. These additional grounds are:

• The complainant has not made reasonable efforts to resolve the complaint with the agency concerned;
• There is an alternative dispute resolution process available to the complainant;
• The complainant knew about the action that is the subject of the complaint for 12 months or more before making the complaint.

Equally, we’ll also be reconsidering the way we handle our interactions with respondent agencies. You may see us taking a more proactive stance at times in the future. For example, we may take the step of communicating our concern about an action (or inaction) by a respondent agency, even though we may have decided not to pursue an investigation in that instance.

The communication will not all be one way. We’d like to know what you think would be helpful to implement the changes, and in what ways we should take the opportunity presented by the new Act to change our approach to ensure we get the best privacy outcomes, for the best value, for all New Zealanders.

This law change gives us all the chance to refresh our approaches and re-set on privacy.

Read our other Privacy 2.0 blog posts here.