Privacy Commissioner now blogging

The Privacy Commissioner now has a blog. Worth subscribing to, if you are interested in privacy issues.

I took part with the Commissioner in a forum last night, organised by IPANZ on what is the price of privacy. Was very enjoyable with a wide range of issues ranging from the recent European Court judgement on Google to data sharing between Government agencies, to data breaches.

One example I touched on was the request to have statistics on the percentage of homes owned by non residents. I agree that such data would be desirable. But it is worth noting that to get very accurate data you would need to data match between the property registers, citizenship registers (and we don’t really have one), immigration status databases, travel records and current address records. Is that level of data collection and matching warranted for the information we would gain from it?