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About OPC

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.

This privacy statement is split into four sections:

• Compliance: see what personal information we collect when we receive and investigate complaints, initiate compliance investigations and inquiries, or handle privacy breach notifications, and what we do with it
• Engagement: the personal information we collect from agency consultations, public submissions, e-learning, events and our website, and what we do with it
• Storage and security: where we store your personal information and how we protect it
• Your privacy rights and how to contact us.

Under these sections, 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.

• 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 most of 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 under the Privacy Act.
• 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.

NOTE: We may update this privacy statement, for example to reflect changes to the Privacy Act. This statement was last updated in May 2026.