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If yours is a small business or organisation, there’s every chance you may be fairly inexperienced in what to do if you receive a request for personal information. But we hope you are at least aware that the Privacy Act gives people the right to make a request for information that is about them.
It is said that a sincere apology should include the three Rs – regret, responsibility and remedy. Why apologise and how to do it properly is a subject we’ve discussed before. But we continue to see apologies that fail to convince a complainant. So it’s something we thought we’d revisit in this post because the quality of an apology is an important part of our efforts to resolve privacy complaints.
Here at the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, we have a statutory duty to use our best endeavours to resolve complaints. Many complaints are resolved when the respondent agency simply apologises to the complainant.
The controversy embroiling Centrelink, the Australian government agency that provides welfare payments, shows no sign of abating as a public and political backlash continues over its apparent mishandling of a debt recovery programme.
Many people in New Zealand - such as students and the elderly - use a concession that gives them a free or subsidised fare on public transport. In order to assess whether someone is eligible for these concession cards, the transport provider collects personal information. This information includes things like student ID cards, tertiary student ID cards or other photo ID.
You can act for yourself in the Human Rights Review Tribunal but the way you conduct your case could lead to you having to pay the costs of the other side.
If you’re one of the thousands of New Zealand Nurses Organisation (NZNO) members whose names and email addresses were accidentally disclosed to a criminal third party, you might be wondering what you can do about it. The first thing you need to do is to try and understand what happened and what the risks are to you.
Callers to our Enquiries service often start with “I need some legal advice”. If the caller means guidance on his or her Privacy Act rights or the obligations of an agency, then we can help. But if by “legal advice” he or she means a legal “opinion” about how the Privacy Act might apply, then this is something our Enquiries service can’t do.
