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Focus areas

Updated 27 May 2025

The Children's Privacy Project focuses on how children’s privacy is being protected and whether the rules protecting children’s privacy rights are working.

While the Privacy Act applies to everyone, it requires people to take extra care when collecting personal information about children and young people.

Download posters to help educate people about protecting children and young people's privacy online.

In May 2025, we developed photography and filming guidance to help organisations protect and respect children and young people’s privacy. This guidance will help to empower them, their parents and caregivers to understand and exercise their privacy rights effectively.

Read our children and young people: photography and filming guidance.

We have also developed other guidance to help those working in the children’s sector, including how to apply best practice privacy when responding to requests for a child or young person’s personal information, and how to help children, young people and their parents protect their privacy while exploring the online world.

Learn how to handle requests for personal information about children and young people.

Our guidance aims to:

• Lift understanding of children’s privacy rights across the children’s sector.
• Provide those working in the children’s sector with best practice privacy advice to ensure children and young people’s privacy rights are protected and respected.
• Empower children and young people (and their parents/caregivers) to understand and exercise their privacy rights effectively.

Further guidance, including detailed privacy guidance for the education sector, will be released later in the year.

These include:

Detailed Sector Privacy Guidance 

Detailed best practice guides are comprehensive guidance documents focusing on a specific area within the children’s sector. These guides are designed to assist people working within a specific area/industry to design and implement best practice privacy practices as they relate to children and young people.

Our first detailed best practice guide will focus on the education sector. This guidance will be applicable to all areas of the sector – whether you are a teacher at an early learning centre, a primary or intermediate school, or at a college or a person or organisation working with students to support learning needs.

The guidance will cover areas such as:

• Children’s Privacy Rights and the Privacy Act 2020.
• Privacy, Security and Confidentiality.
• Collecting, using and sharing information.
• Keeping students and parents/caregiver informed.
• Special Categories of information.
• Accuracy of information.
• Keeping information safe and secure.
• Retaining and disposing of information.
• Managing requests for information.
• Managing privacy breaches.
• Education technology.
• Managing privacy complaints.

To ensure this guidance is fit for purpose an expert advisory group made up of specialists across the education sector will help support us from development through to publication.

Privacy Best Practice Guides

Best practice guides are shorter, topic specific guidance documents. These are designed to help people working within the education sector establish privacy enhancing practices in areas where privacy harms can occur.

Visual Guides

We will be designing downloadable visual guides such as posters so you can print them out and use them in your working environment or as part of digital literacy lessons, or share them with your parent/caregiver community.

Previous work 

Questions and how to contact us

If you have any questions about the Children’s Privacy Project or would like to be added to our Children’s Privacy Project updates email list, you can contact us at children@privacy.org.nz.