I recently posted sceptically on the EQC privacy panic. New Zealand's elevation of beat-up privacy 'concerns' to trump other priorities like speed, cost, the convenience of customers generally and staff efficiency and morale has occurred in the absence of any leadership willingness to confront those who benefit from stupid panics (like lawyers, the compliance industry consultants, IT experts, the Privacy Commissioner, the media, and opposition politicians). I've long been suspicious that recently invented privacy law added little value and was depriving us of ancient freedoms.

A simple first step would be to measure our real privacy preferences against unavoidably competing values.  Daniel Solove and the articles he links to offer some academic support for the view that the recent ACC and EQC (and Privacy Commissioner) panics are based on ignorance. They have probably been doing the privacy equivalent of yelling 'fire' in crowded theatres, stampeding their organisations into sacrificing objectives most of us in fact value more highly.

When we can assign road building and upgrading priorities by systematically investigating and assigning costs and values to road accidents (including a deemed value of a life) and road efficiency the the Privacy Commissioner should be commissioning similar work to ensure she is not feeding irrational waste of resources on her own pet prejudices, probably not shared by most of us. If she won't bring more intellectual rigour to the task she should be replaced by someone who can.