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This webpage will bring together all our children’s privacy related information and provide links to other webpages and child and young person related information.
In September 2023 we launched the Children's Privacy Project, which looked at how children’s privacy is being protected and whether the rules protecting children’s privacy rights are working.
There are some unique challenges and opportunities that relate to the privacy of children and young people as they interact with health and education services and the online world.
To understand these challenges, in late 2023 we consulted with government agencies, professionals who work with children (teachers, doctors, nurses, etc), and non-governmental organisations who advocate for children and young people. We asked them for their thoughts on how to improve children’s privacy in New Zealand.
In April 2024, we released our report summarising the themes and messages we heard during our Children's Privacy Project.
The next phase of the project is the development of guidance covering some of the key themes we heard from our engagement.
Our guidance aims to:
We will be developing guidance covering a variety of topics using a variety of formats. Following is a high-level summary of the guidance we will be developing throughout 2025.
Detailed best practice guides are comprehensive guidance documents focusing on a specific area within the children’s sector. These guides are designed to assist people working within a specific area/industry to design and implement best practice privacy practices as they relate to children and young people.
Our first detailed best practice guide will focus on the education sector. This guidance will be applicable to all areas of the sector – whether you are a teacher at an early learning centre, a primary or intermediate school, or at a college or a person or organisation working with students to support learning needs.
The guidance will cover areas such as:
To ensure this guidance is fit for purpose an expert advisory group made up of specialists across the education sector will help support us from development through to publication.
Best practice guides are shorter, topic specific guidance documents. These are designed to help people working within the education sector establish privacy enhancing practices in areas where privacy harms can occur.
These best practice guides will cover:
To help provide meaningful guidance and advise for children and young people (and their parents/caregivers) we will be designing visual guides such as posters.
These visual guides will cover:
These visuals guides will be downloadable so you can print them out and utilise them within your working environment (for example, place them within your ECE or school, use them as part of your digital literacy lessons, share them with your parent/caregiver community, make them available to children as part of the services you provide them).
If you have any questions about the Children’s Privacy Project or would like to be added to our Children’s Privacy Project updates email list, you can contact us at children@privacy.org.nz.
