Matthew RosenquistFounder & CISO Advisor, Cybersecurity Insights · CISO, Cybersecurity Strategist, & Industry Advisor

New Zealand Releases a Privacy Data Breach Self Test Tool

16 Nov 2020 · 1 min

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1:18

In this short commentary, the speaker highlights New Zealand’s Privacy Commissioner’s newly released online tool, NotifyUs, which enables companies to run a self‑assessment to determine whether a data loss event triggers mandatory breach notification under New Zealand law. The speaker walks through the questionnaire’s key dimensions – the type of data lost, the potential harm and its likelihood, and the security controls in place – and explains how the tool delivers a clear, binary result indicating the required next steps and any applicable penalties. The overall tone praises the clarity and simplicity of the tool, emphasizing its value for fast, understandable compliance when handling security or data breaches.

Chapters

When it comes to privacy, the small country of New Zealand is hitting above its weight. The Privacy Commissioner of New Zealand has released a tool called NotifyUs, and it's intended for companies to be able to conduct a self-test to see if they've lost data, if it constitutes the necessity of notifying end customers, right? Whether it violates the data breach laws and they need to go down a certain path. And there's a number of questions you can go out to the web and you can answer them. And it talks about the type of data, data that's lost, the potential impact or harm, the likelihood that those harms are gonna happen, the type of security controls that have been put in place to mitigate those risks. And it gives you a simple result of what you need to do as a business. This type of clarity helps everyone. It makes it fast, simple, simple, and businesses can readily understand the next steps that they need to do and what the penalties are if they don't. Clear communication is paramount, especially when dealing with security breaches and data breaches. So congratulations, New Zealand, you've done a great job.