I visited my small home town for the first time in a long while over the Easter weekend. This meant having a lot of conversations that started with, “so, where are you working these days?” I would then explain the work that we do here at the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, and was pleasantly surprised by how interested most people were in privacy issues! 

Yahoo, Google, Dropbox, Facebook, Microsoft, Trade Me and others do it. We think it would be a good thing if many New Zealand companies decided to do it too.

Digital communication is ubiquitous: a hair salon sends you text messages reminding you of appointments; movie tickets are booked through apps on your phone – and you wave a card in the air to pay for groceries. Our expectations might be that our health records can be also be swiftly and easily transferred.

Recent attacks in Beirut and Paris have highlighted that governments have to deal swiftly with emergencies – whether deliberately caused or naturally occurring – and have in place statutory powers to restore security and public confidence.

The 2015 Identity Conference began with Deputy Prime Minister Bill English calling for more permissive privacy settings in information sharing across the public sector. It ended 36 hours later with applause and a call for beers.

The case for government agencies identifying opportunities to work together to provide public services is compelling. We expect government to be efficient, to deliver services based on sound reasoning and in ways that bring the most benefit to the people they are trying to help.

The rush to judgment in the Germanwings air crash tragedy is unseemly and precipitous, but entirely predictable and understandable.