Privacy breach shuts down online access
‘‘We take the privacy of the material we hold very seriously.’’ Anahera Morehu chief archivist, Archives New Zealand
Archives New Zealand has indefinitely removed access to its widely used online search system for its collections after restricted records containing private information became publicly visible.
Now the only way people can access Archives’ collections is by going into physical Archives offices and requesting physical copies of records.
On Friday, the Government record-keeping authority discovered that brief record titles containing private information were publicly visible. The full records were not available digitally and have never been accessible to the public.
‘‘We take the privacy of the material we hold very seriously,’’ chief archivist Anahera Morehu said in a statement.
Officials were now investigating whether restricted records have been publicly discoverable.
‘‘This could, potentially, have security and privacy issues which is why we have needed to make collections unavailable to the public,’’ Morehu said.
The incident was the latest in a series of issues that the national archive had experienced with its collections records management system since it went live in February, Morehu said.
Incidents over recent months included records or information associated with records ‘‘appearing in unexpected places’’, she said, and other ‘‘performance issues’’ with the collections search tool.
That included the tool loading slowly or incompletely, not performing some search functions and search results being difficult to navigate.
Other issues included an unreliable process for users to order and pay for a record to be digitised, and some users finding it difficult to create collections search accounts or log in with RealMe.
Archives was unable to provide a timeframe on when the online search tool would be restored, but it said officials were working with urgency on the matter.
The outage affects all users of the search tool, including those who may use it for work or research purposes.
On Tuesday night, a group of senior staff from the Department of Internal Affairs and Archives met with officials from the supplier of collections search, Axiell, to help fix the problem.
Morehu apologised for the impact the closure of the search would have on people.
‘‘This frustration is also shared by Archives NZ and by our archivists who work with the system every day and experience the same issues.’’
Archives would keep the search system down until it had assurances that security and privacy measures were resolved.
It investigated whether it could return to its previous search tool, Archway, but said this was not possible as that technology was no longer maintained, supported or able to be improved.