The website whatdoesmylandlordown.org aimed to use publicly-available data to show how many properties landlords owned. (file image) Photo:
A website which enabled people to find out how many properties their landlord owned has been shut down after breaching the Privacy Act.
'What Does My Landlord Own?' sprang up in February and used publicly available data to link landlords to property ownership records, meaning a renter could type in their landlord's name and see how many other properties they owned and where.
But concerns were raised with the Privacy Commissioner that the website was linking people with properties they did not own.
The site was taken down in June after the person responsible, who goes by the name "Sunset_Flowers", was contacted by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner (OPC) advising the site likely breached the Privacy Act.
This week, the OPC released its official finding that the site was incorrectly identifying individuals as owners of properties when they were not.
The office said the accuracy issue arose from the website's algorithm not differentiating between people of the same name.
The Privacy Commissioner then contacted Land Information New Zealand (Linz), which supplied part of the data, and terminated its licence agreement with the website.
A spokesperson on behalf of the website's creators - who did not want to be named saying the 'political nature' of their work had resulted in threats - told NZME the purpose of the website was to provide open information to the public with a focus on empowering renters and activists.
"We believe that because land ownership is a privileged position in society, upheld by historical and ongoing colonial power, it is important that the general public have as much information as possible in order to hold owners accountable for their impact on individuals, communities, and the land," the spokesperson said.
The spokesperson said every legal property record in New Zealand was reliant on full names and that the Linz database - which their website drew data from - also suffered from this same issue and could not distinguish between property owners of the same name.
They said there were other free services available for people to use to search for property owners which also suffered the same limitation but had not been shut down.
The website, which has since been shut down, now shows a scathing indictment of New Zealand's rental economy and criticism of the deputy privacy commissioner, who in June informed the website's owners it was in breach of the Privacy Act.
In that announcement, which is still live at the website's old address, the owners note that they have made the code used to run their website open-source and freely available. Their spokesperson said they understood providing the code rather than the web tool was not in breach of the legislation.
However, a spokesperson for the Office of the Privacy Commissioner said it would take similar action against any other website breaching the Privacy Act in the same way.
"One of the educational reasons for publishing the case note and naming WDMLO [What Does My Landlord Own] is to provide a learning opportunity. It is a way to educate the public and agencies about their obligations under the law, especially when it comes to the same or similar practice of merging datasets," the spokesperson said.
They said that if the data the website had been returning was accurate it would not have been in breach of the Act.
In its ruling, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner said the information the website was using from Linz was in itself accurate, but "inaccuracies arose when the information was manipulated to form a new data set for the purposes of identifying landlords that owned multiple properties".
It said the website did not put in place "sufficient checks and balances to ensure that inaccuracies had not been introduced into the new data set during its creation".
The commissioner's findings said the website had an obligation to mitigate any privacy breaches before it went live.
"The commissioner has made the decision to provide public comment on the details of this case, as it provides a cautionary example in an increasingly data-driven world."
The commissioner advised others thinking of setting up similar websites that when sourcing third-party data it was important to verify it was accurate for the new purpose it was being used for.
Late last year, the Human Rights Review Tribunal declined a man's request to force a private Facebook group, where landlords publicly name and shame undesirable tenants, to release any information it held about him.
The group Bad Tenants has come under fire from renter advocates in recent years as it provides a space for landlords to share personal information about their tenants as a warning to other property owners, essentially blacklisting them.
The Privacy Commission and Renters United have stated such sharing of private information was against the law.
However, the tribunal said it could not force a Facebook group, which did not have clear ownership, to comply with the Privacy Act.
- This story was first published by the New Zealand Herald.