May

"Polygraph, or lie detector, tests are now being offered to New Zealand companies and recruitment agencies for use in pre-employment checks. The test is part of a growing industry in background checking of new staff, as employers become more aware of the need to make sure they are hiring the correct person.

But critics claim the data collection - which can include checks into a person's ACC history, with their permission - are excessive and take advantage of desperate job seekers. Resume Check owner James Sutherland, whose company offers comprehensive background check packages - including a person's ACC history - said most candidates were accepting of the process. It is important that the information collected be relevant to the role.

Lie Detector New Zealand director Barry Newman, said demand in the pre-employment area had been low, with employers unsure about using the technology in the workplace. "Before shelling out for a highly intrusive service like polygraph testing, common sense as well as privacy rules mean you should check that it's something that you really need and that you have a really good case which can be justified under the Privacy Act," said Assistant privacy commissioner Katrine Evans."

"The EU's justice commissioner has called for bigger fines for companies that breach European data privacy laws. Viviane Reding dismissed recent fines for Google as ""pocket money"" and said the firm would have had to pay $1bn under her plans for privacy failings. Reding said such punishments were necessary to ensure firms took the use of personal data seriously and she wants far tougher laws that would introduce fines of up to 5% of the global annual turnover of a company for data breaches. The new proposals, currently under debate in the European parliament, aim to create a single EU regulator, which would be able to issue fines on behalf of all national watchdogs. The continuing row between Google and local data authorities was a case in point for why new laws were needed, she said. The Spanish data protection agency said that Google had collected information across almost 100 services but had not obtained the consent of people to gather information, or done enough to explain what would be done with the data. According to Reding, European trust in the way private companies store data is low"

"A new handbook on European data protection laws contains a different test from the one used by the UK's ICO for determining whether data is personal or anonymised for the purposes of data protection law. The document is non-binding but is designed to ""raise awareness and improve knowledge of data protection rules in European Union and Council of Europe member states"". EU data protection rules apply to the personal data of living 'data subjects' and not to where that data has been anonymised. Absolute anonymisation has become increasingly difficult in recent times due to the increasing volumes of data being generated and the availability of powerful technologies that allow information from one data set to be linked to information elsewhere. The watchdog's code made clear that the ICO would be unlikely to take enforcement action against organisations that disclose data they believe to have been anonymised when in fact it was not where those organisations could show they had ""made a serious effort to comply with the DPA and had genuine reason to believe that the data it disclosed did not contain personal data or present a re-identification risk.""


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