Some of you will be familiar with Gartner’s ‘hype cycle’. The hype cycle concept is the idea that each promising new technology goes through a similar set of phases before it is widely adopted. It often starts with a hiss and a roar, scales the peak of inflated expectations, drops down into the trough of disillusionment, claws its way up the slope of enlightenment until it finally reaches the plateau of productivity.

If a government agency makes a decision that affects your future, you might well want to find out the reasons for that decision. But the law will not necessarily give you that option.

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.

As reported in last month’s blog, after five years work, government ministers from the 12 Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) countries announced the conclusion of their TPP trade negotiations. The result of the talks is a free trade agreement that seeks to liberalise trade and investment between 12 Pacific Rim countries.

So you are hiring. What do you need to do to meet your privacy obligations? Here’s an easy checklist of do’s and don’ts. They all relate back to the 12 privacy principles that guide the collection, use, storage and disposal of personal information.   

When the Harmful Digital Communications Act (HDCA) passed in June of this year, it brought some changes to the Privacy Act. One of these changes was to section 56, which previously excluded personal, family and household affairs from coverage by the Privacy Act. The effect is that we can now investigate cases stemming from domestic affairs, where the subject matter would be “highly offensive to an ordinary reasonable person”.

A Supreme Court decision released this week is significant in its finding that a digital file can be considered to be property.

What do you get when you gather members of the public to discuss and debate highly offensive material? We did exactly that the other week, and the end result was a good helping of common sense.