Privacy Commissioner to trial corporate transparency reporting

New Zealand companies will be asked to keep records of information requests by local law enforcement agencies in a drive to shed light on the extent government entities are seeking personal data.

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner John Edwards has been working on a pilot transparency reporting project, which has received favourable feedback from its early group of stakeholders, and wants to expand that to help promote openness and accountability, he said in a speech to the annual New Zealand Institute of Intelligence Professionals conference being held in Wellington today.

"Transparency reporting has the potential to increase public awareness of the information gathering activities of law enforcement and security agencies and encouraging companies that hold the information to be open with consumers about the limitations of confidentiality, and the ways in which they cooperate with agents of the state," Edwards said in speech notes.

"This year we intend to trial asking companies to keep a standardised record of requests for information from law enforcement agencies and to report this information to us. We will then publish this information."

Transparency reporting was initiated overseas by search engine giant Google after the US Department of Homeland Security relaxed prohibitions on doing so. That reporting has since been adopted by Microsoft, Facebook and Vodafone, and closer to home, online auction site Trade Me has been publishing government agency information requests for the past two years.

The Privacy Commissioner is working with 14 companies, including telecommunications providers, banks and online platforms, to develop an effective system, and is seeking feedback on the trial.

The Harvard Business Review reported in May that primary care doctors, payment or credit card firms and ecommerce firms topped the list of companies that were trusted to ensure personal data was never misused, while governments, media and entertainment groups, and social media companies were the least trusted.

A New Zealand Unisys survey of 500 people on data security released today showed respondents believe telecommunications companies, government agencies, and banks were more likely to experience data breaches of personal information over the next 12 months than other types of organisations, while airlines were seen as the safest receptacles of private data.

Speaking on the sidelines of the NZIIP conference, Human Rights Chief Commissioner David Rutherford told BusinessDesk the biggest threat to people's privacy was how they signed up to online and mobile applications, with New Zealanders largely complacent about the information they freely share.

Businesses were aware of those risks, because "if your customers lose trust in you, you lose value," Rutherford said.

(BusinessDesk)