Recent changes to the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act 2009 means businesses and professional services will have to put preventative measures in place to help tackle money laundering and the financing of terrorism.

There has been a significant amount of media coverage about our investigation into Westpac bank disclosing journalist Nicky Hager’s bank account information to Police in 2014. In the course of that reporting, some misconceptions have emerged. Because of the interest in the case, and the potential implications for future practice, we have noted some points of clarification and context below.

The issue over whether a person’s past should continue to be discoverable online is one of the big privacy debates of our time. Although the concept of the ‘right to be forgotten’ has been around since 2006, it gained momentum in 2014 when the European Court of Justice agreed that a Spanish man, Mario Gonzalez, had the right to get Google to “break the link” to online information about his past financial difficulties.

ANZ’s privacy and data protection manager Hannah Johnston was a recent guest speaker at our last Technology and Privacy Forum for 2014 and she gave a comprehensive overview about what the bank – New Zealand’s third largest employer after its merger with the National Bank – was doing to protect customer privacy.