About us

This privacy statement explains how the Office of the Privacy Commissioner (OPC) collects, stores, uses and shares your personal information.

The Privacy Act 2020 requires us – like any other New Zealand agency – to tell you certain things about the personal information we need to carry out our functions. This is where we explain our privacy practices and why you can trust us to handle your information with care and respect.

Openness and transparency are important to us. If you find a security issue within our online systems please tell us about it so we can get it fixed. Read our Vulnerability Disclosure Policy.

We have categorised our statutory functions into two broad groups: Compliance and Engagement. Under these groups, we explain what personal information we collect and how we use or share it. We also explain about the way we store and protect personal information and your rights to access and correct it.

In short, here are a few key privacy messages to note:

We only collect personal information where this is necessary to carry out our functions
We may collect personal information about you either directly from you or from other people or agencies, and we may generate personal information about you when we carry out our functions
We store all our data (including your personal information) on a secure Microsoft Azure cloud platform and we use Microsoft Office 365 applications. We protect our data with all reasonable technical and process controls
You can ask us for a copy of your personal information at any time. We will be as open as we can with you but must also ensure we meet our secrecy obligations
We will only use and share personal information where necessary to carry out the functions for which we collected it, or if required by law

If you cannot find the information you need, or you have concerns about the way we are managing your personal information, then please contact us at any time:

We may update this privacy statement from time to time, for example to reflect changes to the Privacy Act, so feel free to check in again occasionally to see what might have changed. This statement was last updated in November 2020.

Compliance

Find out what personal information we collect when we investigate complaints, initiate inquiries, or handle privacy breach notifications, and what we do with it:

Compliance

Engagement

Find out what personal information we collect from enquiries, submissions, e-learning, and events and through our website, and what we do with it:

Engagement

Storage and security

Find out where we store your personal information and how we protect it:

Storage and security

Your privacy rights and how to contact us

Find out how to access or correct your information, and how to complain if you think we’ve misused it:

Your privacy rights and how to contact us