The not so secret lives of us

Journalist Jo Knowsley passed at least six CCTV cameras during her commute from north of Auckland into the CBD. Photo / Jason Dorday

Some yers ago a fellow journalist in London on a rival publication spent a long and probably wet weekend trying to find out everything he could about me.

Rod Liddle of The Spectator magazine in Britain was writing an article discussing the moral issue of privacy - prompted by an interview I had conducted with the mistress of then Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott.

He questioned whether the couple's extra-marital shenanigans justified any public interest, let alone the three pages it was given in a major British newspaper.

Was the sex life of the deputy PM any of our business? he mused, before revealing he had set himself a mission to expose everything he could about my private life.

His efforts were somewhat pitiful. "We know very little about her," he wrote, "save that she is in her 40s and has been heard, allegedly, to brag around the Mail on Sunday newsroom of the prowess of her toy-boy lover."

It would, however, be a very different situation if he were to conduct that research today.

Though the internet and emails were already mainstream tools then, the now all-pervasive social networking site Facebook had not yet spread beyond a few university campuses, and Twitter had not even been invented.

These have created a veritable global honey pot of personal information, ripe for plunder by the Pooh Bears in Government, the corporate world or indeed anyone with a computer who wants to find out more about us.

Is it ironic then, that at a time when there's never been so much personal information flying around the globe, we as individuals seem to crave greater privacy?

We still trust firefighters, ambulance officers, pilots, nurses, doctors and veterinarians - pretty standard ratings which suggest we trust people who save lives. And we're pretty trusting of police, teachers, judges and childcare providers, according to the Readers Digest survey of most trusted professions in NZ last year.

But the number of people choosing not to have their names and addresses published on the electoral roll has almost doubled in the past seven years, jumping from 7622 in 2004 to 14,500 in May this year.

And access to some public registers - such as those holding details of our driving licences and car registration - have been closed to the public for fear they could be used by burglars or stalkers.

Confidential residential listings for phone numbers have decreased by 2.3 per cent in the past 10 years. But that may be because there are now whole households that don't have a landline, instead depending solely on their unlisted mobile phones.

Perhaps the first sign that New Zealanders were becoming more concerned about privacy came in 1993 when the Government set up the office of the Privacy Commissioner, to help people safeguard their personal information and give them some control over who has access to it.

And the office is growing busier by the year. The number of complaints received by the Privacy Commissioner has increased from 636 in 2005 to 978 over 2009-10 and last year alone the number of inquiries (7151) was 500 more than the year before.

Marie Shroff, the Privacy Commissioner, doesn't want to reveal her age when I ask. She declines on the grounds that people might think of her differently if they know it - an interesting introduction for me to the wider issue.

She tells me: "I've developed a very strong interest in the way information is handled . . . and the roles that independent statutory bodies play in acting as watchdogs."

Privacy law today, she adds, is still about communication and information, "but today's communication system is an online world. And we need legal tools to deal with that".

She talks about the welter of new technology - cloud computing, iris scanning, facial reconstruction scans and DNA developments. Then there's eGovernment, eCommerce - "your identity is going to be online from now on" - and smartphones that are internet-enabled but also give access to GPS location tracking technology.

Yet at the same time that New Zealanders have been embracing such technology, their fears over privacy have steadily increased.

Shroff says: "As the tide of technological advances has increased, people's awareness has risen and their concerns have started to rise, though New Zealanders are not quite as concerned as Europeans.

There are two issues really: who has access to people's information and people being denied access to information about themselves."

Governments and businesses have databases bursting with huge amounts of information. As long as they comply with certain rules, they are able to share it with each other and with other agencies, both nationally and abroad. And sometimes it's stored in cloud computing systems - remotely, and usually in a foreign country.

And don't be fooled by the apparent intimacy of social networking websites. That information is collated somewhere too, and often passed to direct marketing companies.

"Businesses can collect information about people and turn it into aggressive marketing. They use that information to profile people and then target market them . . . most people in New Zealand are not aware of this," Shroff says.

"Personal information is an asset which can be turned into money. The individual is the cannon fodder."

We want the convenience new technology provides and we're often happy to share secrets with the global village. But we're less willing to open up to real people at our door, on the street or on the phone in the way that we did decades ago.

Surveillance, of course, is another area that is constantly cranking up. But most of us don't regard this as an intrusion. In fact it makes us feel safer. Nowadays, however, CCTV is everywhere.

Being tracked by CCTV on trains, planes and automobiles from Invercargill to Kaitaia is, I am told, for my protection - though in Auckland, the police, council and transport authorities were loathe to let me see behind the smoke and mirrors into the inner workings of their control rooms.

Almost with one voice, the authorities said they didn't want people to know where the cameras were. It was, they said, a security issue even though so many of the locations were blindingly obvious.

More likely it's because they don't want to admit that their cameras do not produce high enough quality images to offer real evidence of the identity of criminals and, subsequently, no real protection.

In a vicious attack at Sydney's domestic airport in March 2009, police were able to see the mob of men beating their victim to death with metal poles, but the CCTV quality was so poor they couldn't identify any of the killers. So whose interests do they really serve?

Rod Nicolson, director of Vision Security Systems, one of New Zealand's largest providers of CCTV cameras for shopping centres and malls, estimates the numbers of public body cameras - operated by police and councils - have increased tenfold in the past five years. And there are 30 per cent more cameras in supermarkets than there were 10 years ago, he says.

"There are now improved cameras that use IT technology so images are clearer and it's easier to identify people. That's what people want."

We may accept cameras in dairies and dress fitting rooms (whether it's to protect ourselves or the profits of shopkeepers) but we are less ready to share details of our private lives.

Last year a Global Privacy Enforcement Network was set up with the involvement of some 50 privacy regulators, including New Zealand. The aim is to monitor the way personal information is transferred and stored.

At the same time, the Law Commission has spent the past five years reviewing the Privacy Act 1993.

Issues discussed in the report, to be published in the next month, include how to monitor and control the privacy implications of new technology; to what extent government departments should be able to share information about citizens; and whether there should be an obligation to notify people if information about them is wrongly released or lost.

Professor John Burrows, of the New Zealand Law Commission, says the advance of technology is a major privacy issue.

But there are also concerns that the Privacy Act itself is not always understood, leading some authorities to refuse to give out information that is a matter of public record. (Or, as the commission noted in the Issues Paper in March less year: "There is a syndrome known as BOTPA: Because of the Privacy Act'. In other words withholding information incorrectly.").

Professor Burrows says: "We have to make sure information isn't unreasonably withheld, and that individuals can get access to information about them held by agencies."

Last month, Waitakere District Court wrongly cited the Privacy Act as grounds for not disclosing whether a childcare worker allegedly caught with P in a stolen car had admitted the charge, or had been allowed out of jail to return home. This should have been a matter of public record.

Shroff is keen to protect New Zealanders and help them protect themselves. And the Privacy Commissioner agrees we have grown more privacy conscious than we were in the past.

"Facebook and Twitter were like new toys, a virtual life zone where people were kind of playing and trying it out. I think the penny has dropped now that this is not a virtual world or a free zone - it needs to be used safely.

"But it's wrong to think young people don't care about their privacy. They do."

Most New Zealanders believe Facebook and Google should be regulated to protect personal privacy, according to a new poll by UMR research. But New Zealanders are more positive about Google than Australians.

More than half (54 per cent) of Kiwis think Google already does a good job protecting privacy, compared with 45 per cent of Australians.

Reports that college students have been complaining that their parents or teachers "spy" on them on Facebook, however, suggests that many young people believe only their friends are looking at their conversations and photographs. That those exchanges are, well, private.

Ron McQuilter, of Paragon, a private investigations agency that specialises in finding adopted children and missing family members, found a considerable amount out about me in one hour - somewhat more than Liddle managed in 2006.

"When I began in this business 28 years ago there were no computers," he says. "You had to go to the Companies Office and the Land Transfer Office - there was no centralised place. "Now it's different. The information is out there and often easy to access. People need to be aware of that."

This is your life: an open book

It took Auckland private investigator Ron McQuilter less than an hour to discover the following information about journalist Jo Knowsley.

- Joanne Margaret Knowsley (likes to be known as Jo)

- Photo on file

- Aged about 53 years (born 1958?)

- Comes from a strong family of Knowsleys in the Wellington region?

- Went to Sacred Heart College between 1973 and 1976

- Has been in journalism since leaving school

-Also attended New Zealand Drama School. In fact went to Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts

- Went to live in Sydney, Australia. Seems to prefer the Sunday papers or magazines as a work focus and is interested in social issues

- Worked in a variety of papers in the UK, most prominent being the Mail on Sunday for at least two or more years, 2007 to 2010. Jo worked for the Mail on Sunday from 2000 to 2007 when she left Britain. She remained a foreign correspondent for the paper

- Lived in London with Helen Beckreck and David Hensley around 2002 to 2006

- Claims to have been married so might be separated or divorced with a new partner, well-known photographer and jornalist Oscar Kornyei who has also travelled extensively

- He might be from Dunedin. There is Kornyei family there. Oscar is from Hungary and moved to Australia with his family in 1981 when he was 10