Is it acceptable for a lawyer acting for a client to send a very private communication to a work email address of the other party?

Some privacy commentators consider ‘big data’ to be a newspeak phrase that attempts to repackage older familiar terms like ‘personal information’ in a way that reframes the concept and limits the way people think about the privacy issues. 

I had to buy a car for the teenager. OK, I didn’t have to but I wanted to. He could have bought himself a bomb but mother didn’t fancy the loss of sleep. It had to be something small and zippy (but not too zippy), and safe (like a zillion air bags safe).

Keeping children safe on the internet is a difficult task in today’s rapidly evolving technological world. To make it easier, the Privacy Commissioner in conjunction with Netsafe and supported by the NZ National Commission for UNESCO, has developed an online privacy resource to do just that.   

Since the publication of Nicky Hager’s book Dirty Politics, I’ve received a number of complaints and enquiries from people concerned about the book’s content. Each of those matters will receive the due consideration afforded to each of the 800 plus complaints and 9000 enquiries dealt with by this Office each year.

Update: We've received 11 submissions on our proposed 'naming policy'. Given the level of interest in the proposal, we've decided to postpone making the change to the new policy which was to take effect on 1 November. It will now not be adopted before December and we will be taking the extra time to fully consider the detailed and thoughtful points raised by submitters.

Many an email has gone to the wrong recipient because a sender has unwittingly accepted an incorrect auto-complete entry. For this reason, like many others, we encouraged all our users to disable auto-complete.

In trying to resolve a privacy dispute or complaint, the Privacy Commissioner has the power to make people attend a compulsory conference. This is a little known feature of the Privacy Act and it has been perhaps underutilised in the 21 years that the Act has been around.