Maori expert criticizes New Zealand’s biometric code

New Zealand is slated to receive its first code of practice for regulating biometric data by mid-2025. Members of the Māori, however, say that the upcoming regulation falls short of its expectations while caution towards the technology continues among members of the country’s indigenous groups.

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner (OPC) started discussing the introduction of the upcoming Privacy Code of Practice for Biometrics in 2021. The draft regulation was then released for public consultation in December last year.

While the Privacy Commissioner is still considering the feedback, the public engagement period has raised a range of concerns from Māori related to the processing of biometric data. This includes cultural harms such as racial bias and profiling, lack of accuracy leading to misidentification, and surveillance overreach, according to Tahu Kukutai, a professor of demography at the University of Waikato in Hamilton.

“One of the privacy safeguards includes an assessment of the cultural impacts and effects of biometric processing on Māori; and although this clearly speaks to the commissioner’s responsibility to take account of cultural perspectives on privacy, it falls short of Māori expectations and OPC’s indications in the public engagement leading up to the release of the consultation draft,” she says.

Public surveys have shown that the Māori are more concerned about privacy. Recent incidents involving biometric data collection have only increased these concerns, Kukutai writes in an article for Science.

In 2021, the New Zealand police forces were found to be unlawfully taking, storing, and using people’s private biometric information, including young Māoris.  Incorporating biometric data into policing has raised concerns of bias and discrimination, particularly against Māori and Pasifika populations.

Last year, a Māori woman was also falsely identified as a shoplifter and confronted by staff at a supermarket owned by parent company Foodstuffs. The incident has put the Foodstuffs facial recognition pilot under a magnifying glass, sparking an investigation from the Privacy Commissioner.

Concerns over surveillance and racial profiling are compounded by different culturological understandings of biometric data. Māori data experts have previously requested that Indigenous data be classified as a “treasured possession.” Biometric data should be protected in accordance with tikanga Māori, or customary values for proper conduct, argues Kukutai.

“Māori concerns about biometrics are also rooted in a fundamentally different worldview from Western privacy norms,” she says. “For one, biometric information is seen as inherently related to whakapapa, or genealogical connection, and thus having a collective as well as a personal dimension.”

Article Topics

biometric data  |  biometric identification  |  biometrics  |  data privacy  |  Māori  |  New Zealand  |  New Zealand Privacy Commissioner  |  regulation