Privacy watchdog barks at shadows
Our copy of the White Pages landed last month; anaemic by name and nature. A few years ago the Auckland directories were a robust three-volume door-stop delivered to half a million customers; now, all that’s left is a thin and pallid few pages delivered to barely 20,000 homes.
It seems they’re struggling to offload even those copies: we thought we’d opted out of hard copies, but one landed on our front verandah regardless.
There are three reasons for the directory’s decline: more people look up phone numbers online; fewer have landlines, and those that do have landlines choose to keep the numbers private.
I joined that last group this weekend: sick of receiving little but scam calls on the home number, I asked to have my listing removed from the printed and online directories. But it was with some sense of nostalgic regret.
Twenty years ago, it would never have occurred to us that our names, addresses and phone numbers might be private information. Being able to phone someone down the street and ask to borrow that oft-cited cup of sugar – that was part of being a community. Now, many people live increasingly insular lives.
Even as we disclose more and more deeply personal information to Facebook, the malicious coders of Cambridge Analytica and the fake news spammers of Macedonia, we are scared to reveal our phone number to our immediate neighbours.
Next month New Zealand marks 25 years since the passing of the Privacy Act, the first comprehensive privacy law outside Europe.
It is a quarter century in which the courts have tightened the tort of privacy. When broadcaster Mike Hosking and his estranged wife sued a photographer over photos taken of their family in a busy street, the Court of Appeal rules against the Hoskings – but did set in place a common law right to privacy for future claimants.
The District Court picked up that precedent and ran with it: a few years later when police distributed fliers warning of the arrival of a convicted paedophile in Wellington’s Strathmore, the judge found they had breached his privacy. Police were ordered to pay Barry Brown $25,000 in damages.
And in that quarter century, a succession of Privacy Commissioners have performed their duties with activist diligence. In the past week alone, Commissioner John Edwards has opened a war of words with Facebook’s privacy officer, announced he is deleting his Facebook account, questioned racial profiling by Immigration NZ, reiterated his demand for milliondollar fines on businesses, and lined up in support of the privacy rights of Mega mogul Kim Dotcom.
In December, he even spent public money filing submissions in the US Supreme Court opposing government access to the emails of an accused drug trafficker. Did that case have anything do do with New Zealand? No, not at all.
The privacy watchdog has yapped at shadows outside; the worried public has rushed to double-lock the front door. Expectations around privacy have increased over 25 years. A biennial survey ordered by (you guessed it) the Privacy Commission has found younger Kiwis are increasingly worried about invasion of privacy.
We are becoming fragile and paranoid. As we fight to conceal information that was once public, it subsumes the genuinely personal information like health records.
Much of what is best about New Zealand is our spirit of community. When we and our neighbours avert eyes in the street, when we hide behind privacy protections and the locked doors of our homes, then we erode that spirit.