Health / Law

Mandatory record-keeping: Should we be concerned about privacy?

09:05 am on 3 September 2021

Listen

From next Tuesday everyone over the age of 12 will be required to keep a record of every "busy place or event" they've been to.

The move is to combat low levels of scanning or signing in outside of a Covid outbreak and help assist with contact tracing.

But with the big increase in information about to be gathered - what are the privacy protections in place?

That's something of concern to Dr Andrew Chen, a Research Fellow at Koi Tū: The Centre for Informed Futures, at The University of Auckland.

He's written an open letter to Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins asking for legislation to clarify that data collected for contact tracing purposes will ONLY be used for contact tracing purposes.

Photo: RNZ / Dom Thomas