Privacy law blockbuster loses the plot

The Law Commission’s blockbuster final report on a review of the Privacy Act suggests a solution looking for problem – and what a problem, to judge from its size.

The epic project – the commission calls it a “landmark” – has run to four reports with the last, issued this week, running to more than 360 pages and containing some 100 plus recommendations.

It’s an exercise that rivals the on the sale of liquor laws, a far more important issue affecting many more people. Privacy is a vastly over-rated concept that was invented in law when it took a building to house a computer and fears of big brother were common.

The main thing that has changed since then is that every one has a computer, unfathomable amounts of data can be carried in a chip the size of a thumb nail and no one died from a lack of privacy.

Yet this report is based on the idea that the law should catch up to the technology and the bureaucracy to run it should be vastly expanded from a low-level complaints-driven service to one where privacy commissioners have enforcement powers, require holders of information undergo audits and that notices of breaches be mandatory.

There should be a law against it
Naturally, the commission looked into a range of privacy concerns but these were of the Facebook variety; an example is where an aggrieved ex-lover posted naked pictures of their former partner.

There should be a law against it, I hear you say: so does the commission, with nobs on. It delves into other low-level annoyances – direct marketing, for example (all but ban it by setting up a Do Not Call register) – and generally seeks to extend the whole range of existing rules, which range from not revealing who’s on a plane or in hospital.

The report correctly concludes the lines on what sort of information should remain private are blurred when everyone is Twittering and callphones have GPS.

One area of the report, on cloud computing, attracted the attention of law firm Chapman Tripp. If you haven’t heard of cloud computing, it means storing your information somewhere other than on your computer – Bangalore, for example.

But this convenience doesn’t exempt you from the reach of privacy laws, Chapman Tripp says, because

you will still be responsible under the Privacy Act for controlling access to and use of the data and for protecting the legal rights of the individuals whose information has been gathered.

Just as well the innovators don’t pay attention to outdated laws, though if they did catch up compliance issues would no doubt bring civilisation to a halt.

Rather than read the report, I suggest you freshen up on this article in The Economist, which last year described the impact of social network and its next stage, mobile phones.

A new crop of networking firms has already sprung up to capitalise on the opportunities offered by mobile phones. That opens up the prospect of even broader changes in the social-networking landscape.

In a related article this year, The Economist described the state of UK privacy laws, which are being reviewed by the Parliament. Not surprisingly, the article concludes privacy laws are “a messy business.”

Removing the taint
It will be some time before the final word is made on Anders Breivik, so one more item won’t hurt.

Much has been made of his various connections and, more relevant, the sources of his 1500-page “manifesto,” 2083: A European Declaration of Independence. Anyone who is conservative, Christian and has views on how immigrants should integrate into their new societies will feel tainted by association.

So it is refreshing to find a couple of commentators prepared to stand up for some of the above and help remove the taint.

Daniel Pipes, at National Review and is mentioned in the “manifesto,” draws parallels between Breivik and two Americans, the “Unabomber” and Timothy McVeigh, plus an Israeli, who are

four outstanding exceptions to the dominant rule of Islamist mass murder. One website, TheReligionOfPeace.com, counts 17,500 terrorist incidents on behalf of Islam in the past 10 years; extrapolating, that comes to some 25,000 since 1994. We are dealing with two very different orders of magnitude.

The other commentator is the outspoken columnist Ann Coulter, who takes to task the New York Times for loose language and slurs.

McCully’s world – the Arab version
A little-noticed speech by Foreign Affairs Minister Murray McCully outlines how events in the Arab world are affecting New Zealand’s trade and other interests.

The speech, given to an Institute of International Affairs audience, reveals the extent of these interests:

• The Gulf Co-operation Council is our seventh largest market for goods, taking $1.2 billion of products in the year to December 2010;

• 8000 Gulf Students are studying in New Zealand;

• Eight of Fonterra’s top 30 global markets are in the Arab region; and

• “We are within a hair’s breadth of concluding an FTA with the GCC which is hung-up on the bilateral issue of live sheep exports to Saudi Arabia.”

He mentioned the loss of markets in strife-torn Libya and Yemen, both worth about $50 million annually, and New Zealand’s scepticism, if not opposition at this stage, to any attempt by Palestinians to gain recognition in the UN.