About

Life at the privacy coalface

At times, advising on privacy matters can be nerve-wracking. We may wonder whether we’ve:

• identified the relevant laws
• asked the right questions, and
• done what’s required to both serve our agency and protect people’s privacy.

We may wonder whether the Privacy Commissioner would agree with us, whether our agency or client might end up on the front page if we get it wrong, and whether our heads might roll.

Alternatively, a client may need to act swiftly, but in circumstances where relevant privacy-related questions haven’t been asked and an assessment was required yesterday!

Real concerns

At StopLookGo Privacy, we know these concerns are real. We know privacy is not only about having a look at the Privacy Act’s information privacy principles (IPPs). We know the IPPs can be challenging at the margins, we know what it’s like to have to jump from the IPPs to rules in an applicable Privacy Act code of practice, and we know about the hundreds of statutory provisions that can override, modify or operate alongside the IPPs and rules.

We also know what it’s like to have sleepless nights, whether due to worrying about whether we’ve asked the right questions and done the right thing, or because a client needs something like a privacy statement or an information-sharing MOU “tomorrow thanks”.

We’ve felt these things and we’ve seen clients and colleagues feel them too.

We want to help

We want to help. We do that by providing a 9-step framework, born from experience and premised on the concepts of:

• ‘stopping’ to ensure we understand what we need to understand to reach the right outcome
• ‘looking’ to ensure we assess the right questions, and
• ‘building’, when required, to ensure we have the right documents to comply with the law and control the sharing of personal information and non-personal data, before we ‘go’.

 

Hi, I’m Richard Best, founder of StopLookGo Privacy

StopLookGo Privacy is born from hands-on experience and a firm belief that there’s a better way to help clients address the privacy-related issues they face on a day-to-day basis. During my 25 years of legal practice, I’ve worked at Bell Gully, Ashurst (UK and Germany), the Commerce Commission, the State Services Commission, and the Departmental of Internal Affairs, and for the last 8 years I’ve been in private practice. My practice is Richard Best Law which is a member of the Interwoven Law Alliance. During that time, I’ve worked on a wide range of privacy-related matters, from both in-house and external advisory perspectives, and for both the public and private sectors. That experience and my interest in automation dovetailed into the realisation that we could systematise and semi-automate some of the most frequently-encountered issues that privacy officers, privacy practitioners and lawyers face, accelerating assessment and drafting timeframes and limiting their agencies’ risks. StopLookGo Privacy is the result.