It’s possible that you haven’t heard of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). However, it is likely that the ITU affects your life in some way. The ITU is the UN agency responsible for information and communication technology. One of their key functions is standard-setting. They set the technical standards that make it possible to send a text message to an overseas phone without having to get some kind of complex adaptor; they also help to assign satellite orbits so that you don’t get abrupt service interruption from two (or more) satellites crashing into one another.

The Privacy Commissioner is currently reviewing the Credit Reporting Privacy Code. The principal focus of the review is the operation of the two amendments made to the Code made five years ago to allow positive credit reporting to be introduced into New Zealand.

The International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners has been meeting each year since 1979. It has evolved into a reasonably structured format, governed by a five-member Executive Committee consisting of the current year’s host, the previous year’s host, and three elected members.

Personal health information in electronic health records is increasingly shared in many settings, across disciplines and health care organisations. In recognition of this, considerable work has been done at the highest professional levels around patient record access, data security and the privacy safeguards required of the new systems.

As a result of a complaint, Police began an investigation into a woman who worked at a district health board. The complaint alleged that she may have accessed DHB health records in order to locate children who had been the victims of crimes committed by her brother.

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.

Your thoughts about our country’s security and intelligence agencies might fall into one of at least four broad categories. We’ve listed them as:

The International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners, which New Zealand has chaired since 2014, had its 38th annual meeting in Marrakesh, Morocco, in October, but more on that later.