WHAT IS PRIVACY?
What is privacy? It’s a question I’ve encountered many times in my seven and a half years as New Zealand’s Privacy Commissioner. Many assume it has a narrow meaning: the right to keep everything to yourself; to tell no one anything. But in New Zealand law, privacy is more nuanced. It involves transparency – an obligation on agencies to tell you what they’re going to do with your personal information, and your right to see what they’ve got on you. These agencies are obliged to protect your information with adequate security safeguards and even check that it is accurate and up to date before using it. And they can use it only for the purposes for which it was collected. But that’s just the law. What else is privacy?
Privacy is a matter of life and death. When a ransomware attack, via a security weakness, hit the Waikato District Health Board earlier this year, it forced the cancellation of radiology and diagnostic services, and clinicians could not access their patients’ medical records. Lives were at stake because
