Privacy: The Foundation of Trust.
Unitec is participating in Privacy Week 2022 (9-14 May 2022). This year, the theme is “Privacy: The Foundation of Trust”. Privacy Week is an opportunity for agencies to promote awareness of privacy issues and the importance of protecting of personal information.
The Privacy Act 2020, together with mandatory privacy breach reporting, has been in force for over a year now. In 2021, the education sector as a whole reported 25 serious privacy breaches to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner (thankfully, none of these were from Unitec! Although we have had a few minor breaches).
The Privacy Commission recently put forward the following guidelines for preventing privacy breaches from occurring:
- All personal information, whether it is of a ‘sensitive’ nature or not, requires legal protection. Personal information must be treated with careful respect.
- Access to personal information should be restricted to only those who need to see the information. This protects the individual who is the subject of the information, as well as your staff and your organisation.
- Identifying, reporting and reviewing privacy breaches, and acting when individual or systemic issues are identified, are vital to ensuring that a strong privacy culture exists. All privacy breaches (whether serious or not) should be reported to the privacy officer and reviewed as a privacy breach.
- More than 60% of reported privacy breaches were due to ‘human error’. Organisations are responsible for ensuring their systems are fit for purpose and that the personal information they hold is protected by reasonable security safeguards.
- Poor email hygiene is a common cause of privacy breaches. Always double check the recipient of emails, and use the BCC field when emailing groups of recipients.
Unitec’s Privacy Procedures is a really useful document that lists the key requirements applying to all staff and certain roles/departments, and includes a ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ section. You can also visit the Privacy Commission’s website as it has some excellent resources.
If anyone would like more information about any aspect of privacy law or have further queries, please feel free to contact;
Kara Hiron – e: kara.hiron@manukau.ac.nz | e: khiron@unitec.ac.nz