Guest post by Katrine Evans, Senior Associate at Hayman Lawyers. Originally published on Linkedin Pulse. 

The New Zealand Privacy Act 1993 was formally recognised by the European Commission (EC) in 2012 as meeting European legal standards of data protection thereby facilitating the free flow of personal data from EU countries to New Zealand for processing.

In an echo of a case we investigated last year, a Welsh court has given a British man who was injured in a Welsh police cell access to security camera footage of the incident.

Administering the Privacy Act is as much about telling people what they can do with personal information, as what they can’t. We’ve been coming up with new ways to help agencies understand what the Privacy Act does, and doesn’t do, in order to reduce uncertainty, and promote good practice.

In 2015, we distributed our $70,000 Privacy Good Research Fund to four different projects, all of which focused on finding new evidence about an aspect of privacy. Last month, that fund came to fruition and we had our Privacy Research Symposium, a day where the recipients of the fund presented their findings.

Privacy scholars from the Asia Pacific region recently gathered to share research, ask difficult questions, push the boundaries of privacy concepts and grapple with the challenges of new technology. Several themes emerged including cultural concepts of privacy, the pervasive collection of personal information, challenges to rights of access to personal information and the impact of the new European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The 46th Asia Pacific Privacy Authorities Forum (APPA) was hosted by the National Institute for Transparency, Access to Information and Personal Data Protection (INAI), in Manzanillo, Mexico, from 30 November to 2 December 2016.

Sir Bruce Houlton Slane KNZM, CBE, LLB practiced law in New Zealand for almost 50 years, including 11 years as the country’s first Privacy Commissioner.