The New Zealand Privacy Commissioner Annual Report was published on 26 November 2024. It revealed that 864 privacy breach notifications were received and that 1,003 complaints had been processed, with financial settlements in 6.5% of complaints. A key highlight reported was the European Commission determining that New Zealand has an adequate level of protection for personal data transferred from the European Union.
The report sets out four recommended amendments to the Privacy Act 2020 to ‘further modernise’ and ‘strengthen privacy outcomes’ including:
- A ‘right of erasure’ to enable individuals to ask agencies to delete their personal information.
- Establishing a new and significantly stronger penalty regime for agencies to take privacy seriously.
- Requiring agencies to demonstrate how they meet their privacy requirements, such as the privacy management programmes recommended by the OECD.
- Providing New Zealanders with stronger protections for automated decision making, such as AI, which can have issues with inaccurate predictions, discrimination, unexplainable decisions and a lack of accountability.
Read the full report here.
