Museums Aotearoa appear at Select Committee hearing
Image: Museums Aotearoa Chief Executive Adele Fitzpatrick and Auckland Museum Director David Reeves at Select Committee Hearing, 25 July 2024.
Several sectors have appealed to the government at the select committee process, that they should be exempt from the proposed Privacy Amendment Act, currently being consulted on.
The Act would require companies and other organisations to notify people when they indirectly acquire their data from another party.
So many organisations were asking for exemptions that National MP James Meager said on Thursday if the committee accepted all the pleas it would “be close to exempting every kind of organisation in the country”.
But at select committee hearings multiple commercial interests said it would be costly, undermine normal commerce, and result in people being subjected to a bewildering number of text and email notifications from organisations acquiring their data.
GLAM sector organisations as well as historians say the planned law would be an existential threat to them.
Adele Fitzpatrick, from Museums Aotearoa, the industry association for museums, said: “This means that any references to, or images of, a living person would require a museum, gallery, library or archive to seek that person’s permission to collect and display their name, and or image.”
There is an exception in the bill that would allow organisations not to notify people, if it was “not reasonably practical”, but David Reeves, chief executive of Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira, told MPs that was not enough as it would leave GLAM institutions guessing as to what they needed to do.
Reeves said in 2010, the Auckland War Memorial Museum was gifted the Sir Edmund Hilary archive of over 100 boxes of documents, some 30 linear metres of stacked documents, and 30,000 photographs, containing many references and images of living people.
Would it have accepted that archive, if it meant going through it to identify every living person, and notifying them that it included personal data, he asked.
“It’s a job that feels insurmountable, perhaps, if you will forgive the joke, like Everest itself,” he said.
