Epic phone ordeal over privacy breach
An Immigration NZ privacy breach — which has been blamed on “human error” — has seen an Auckland man receive the private visa details of an Irish national.
Umair Iftikhar was caught up in the breach while helping his Chinese mother-in-law apply for a visitor visa.
On February 15, an eVisa letter addressed to an Irish national was couriered to Iftikhar’s home in Ellerslie, along with original visa documents used in his mother-in-law Aili Wang’s application.
This eVisa letter was an update of the Irishman’s permanent residency visa, and a print-out of it was necessary for him to re-enter New Zealand.
The letter contained the man’s name, DOB, nationality, passport number, start date of his new visa, and client and application numbers for his visa application.
Immigration NZ manager Michael Carley said the privacy breach had occurred due to “human error”, adding the department had been “in contact with both the applicant and recipient of the incorrect eVisa letter and apologised for the error”.
“With more than one million visa decisions made in the last 12 months, sometimes mistakes are made,” Carley said.
A spokesperson for the NZ Privacy Commission said “as far as we’re aware” this INZ privacy breach had not been notified to them. But the nature of the complaint did not breach the “threshold of seriousness” that a Government department would be expected to self-report to the commission.
When he first alerted the Weekend Herald to the breach on March 2, Iftikhar said he had been consistently trying to get in touch with Immigration NZ for 10 days, but had been repeatedly placed on hold.
Between February 5 and March 4, Iftikhar has phone records for at least 11 calls he made to the Immigration NZ help-line, spending around 10 hours on hold in total.
“Finally, I got hold of NZ immigration today [March 2].”
On Tuesday, following the Weekend Herald contacting INZ over Iftikhar’s case, the correct eVisa letter for his mother-in-law was emailed through — three weeks after Iftikhar had first contacted INZ.