Office of the Privacy Commissioner | We’re changing the way we respond to public enquiries
For many years we’ve operated a bespoke enquiries service. People and agencies have been able to contact us through a dedicated enquiries@ email address and 0800 number to ask their privacy questions.
The volume of these enquiries has long outnumbered our ability to answer them. Many are questions that people could have quickly answered themselves using our website and many could also have been answered by agencies’ privacy officers.
Given this, we’re changing the way we respond to public enquiries. You can expect to see these changes in the next few months.
- We will be phasing out the use of enquiries@ email address. Agencies, businesses, and organisations should tell their privacy officers or communications people so they can remove reference to the email from your website, privacy statements, and other guidance material.
- Our 0800 number won’t change. Instead of being answered by a human, an automated message will give callers a suite of options to choose from.
- We’ve considered accessibility needs in our 0800 options.
- We’ll direct people to Our Ask Us knowledge base, which has already asked and answered more than 650 popular privacy questions
- We will create a new suggestion form so people can tell us about new content they want to see on the website if they can’t find an answer in our knowledge base.
We’re not changing how people log privacy complaints; our online complaint form will stay the same.
How privacy officers can help
Every agency is required by law to have a privacy officer. It’s their role to advise and ensure compliance with privacy legislation within their organisation. We offer information and training resources for privacy officers, as well as guidance on a wide range of topics, free tools for agencies, and free e-learning modules.
We will no longer be providing one to one advice to agencies either, unless there is a statutory requirement to do so. We do currently receive requests for advice on high risk projects and we will need to carefully consider which of these we can respond to.
How we’ve come to this decision
We commissioned an independent review of our public complaints and enquiries functions, which considered the growing demand for our services, our constrained resources, the risks to staff, and new technological developments (such as AI). We decided that we need to prioritise resolving privacy harms and maximise our limited resources.
More details about the changed service will be provided in next month’s issue of our newsletter, Privacy News.