Our regular series of Technology & Privacy Forums have been run by this Office for over a decade. The Forums have featured a diversity of voices discussing issues involving technological changes and how they intersect with the protection of people’s personal information.

It might sound strange but complaints are the lifeblood of our office. We receive them, vet them and investigate them. And because we are the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, people need to have absolute confidence in the security of our complaints process.

Like many I woke last Thursday to the horrific news of the live on air execution of a US journalist and her cameraman, and subsequent suicide of their disgruntled former colleague. The killings were captured on digital video and broadcast first by the victims, and then by the shooter, who uploaded his “first person” footage to social media before taking his own life.

For 37 million people, the Ashley Madison data breach is a nightmare scenario. Extremely sensitive, personal information is in the public domain to be perused and abused by anyone takes a mind to do so.

When the Ashley Madison data breach story first broke, it was quite isolated. It was a criminal matter for local authorities and a PR disaster for Ashley Madison itself, but that’s as far as it went.

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.

What happens when an agency’s record of your identity conflicts with who you actually are? This is the question we grappled with in an Immigration New Zealand (INZ) case that we recently referred to the Director of Human Rights Proceedings.

People have a right to access information about themselves. When workplace policies reinforce this right, it is risky to deviate from them. This was recently underlined in a Human Rights Review Tribunal decision to award a former Capital Coast DHB (CCDHB) nurse $15,000 for being denied information about a harassment complaint she made against her manager.