Why Faraday's privacy know-how is now free

Faraday is a privacy foundry founded in Auckland. We help people and organisations who are at risk because of who they are, what they do, or the information they handle. We help people take back control of their online lives, sometimes in advance and often in a crisis. We help organisations turn privacy law into habits their staff actually follow.

Most of that work follows a method, and a method can be written down. So we’ve written it down and given it away, because we want to democratise this work, to keep people safe and secure, without the hefty bill for the basics, or even detailed work that moves the needle. If your situation needs a person, you can still get in touch.

What’s here

• Guides for people: what’s public about you in New Zealand and how to reduce it, account security, scams, harassment, intimate image abuse, technology-facilitated abuse, identity theft, and your rights under the Privacy Act.
• Guides for organisations: the Privacy Act in plain language, a 90-day programme for a small organisation, breach response, the new indirect collection rule, the biometrics code, AI, Māori data, and data governance.
• Tools that run in your browser and send nothing anywhere, including a statutory deadline calculator, request letters, a breach assessment record, an indirect collection check, a personal exposure audit and a privacy self-check.
• Templates: privacy statements, collection notices, a privacy impact assessment, a breach response plan and register, an inventory, a retention schedule, policies, and a digital safety plan.

Everything is licensed for reuse. The content is CC BY 4.0 and the code is MIT. Put our breach plan in your staff handbook. Run the exposure audit in a workshop. Fork the whole site.

Why give it away

Privacy advice in New Zealand is often sold as if it were secret. It isn’t. The law is public. The Privacy Commissioner publishes good guidance, including Poupou Matatapu, which sets out what doing privacy well looks like, and explicitly invites organisations to build their own checklists and templates from it. Much of what consultancies charge for is applying that public material to ordinary situations. That method can be written down, so we’ve written it down.

The need is real. Organisations reported 1,093 privacy breaches to the Commissioner in 2024/25. The National Cyber Security Centre received 1,129 incident reports in just April to June 2026. Netsafe said in June that it was receiving more harmful digital communications complaints than at any time in its history. Most of the people and organisations behind those numbers will never hire a consultant.

What we won’t pretend

Free guidance has limits, and we say so. If you’re facing a complex legal situation, talk to a lawyer. If you’ve been hit by ransomware, or you’re facing a cyber challenge you don’t feel comfortable navigating yourself, call the NCSC and get incident response or forensic help. If someone is hurting you, call 111, Women’s Refuge or Shine. Our free versus paid page sets out where professional help is worth paying for.

How we keep it accurate

Every legal claim on this site links to its source, and every source carries the date we last checked it. You can see how it’s built in the source code.

When the law changes, we’ll update the guidance and say what changed. If you spot an error, tell us. If you’re a privacy practitioner, lawyer or advocate, we’d especially welcome your review.

Ngā mihi to everyone who trusted Faraday with their hardest moments online. This is for you, and for anyone in Aotearoa who needs it.