Do I have to give my employer personal information when I leave?

Any information you have gathered in the course of carrying out your employment duties is information your employer is entitled to keep.

However, in some cases, you may have information which is a mix of business information and personal information – for instance, personal emails sent from your work account, or personal information stored on a work phone given to you to use. For example, 'Academic denied request for 12,000 work emails(external link)' about an employee seeking emails made on the work system.

If you have any concerns about what information your employer might be entitled to access, you should check what policy, if any, your employer has in place.

For example, many workplaces have a policy which permits staff to use work-issued phones for personal use outside of work. That policy might say that the phone and its contents remain the property of the employer, but that the employee will be entitled to retrieve any personal information on the phone when they leave their employment.

Other workplaces may also let you use your own personal device (also known as BYOD – ‘bring your own device’). If they do, they should also have a policy clearly setting out what information they expect to be able to access or how they intend to gather any business information from you if you leave their employment.

New Zealand National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has produced guidance on BYOD policies(external link), with links to further guidance. 

The American standards organisation NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) also has BYOD guidance. You can find that here(external link) (opens to PDF, 435KB).

If your employer doesn’t currently have a policy about what information it expects to be able to access or collect back from you at the end of your employment, then it will need to be able to explain to you what it is collecting and why (you may also want to suggest that the agency gets in touch with us so we can help them to develop a policy to put in place).

Updated October 2025