Welcome to this latest edition of the Asia-Pacific Dashboard Digest; it has been another big week in the field of privacy — which seems to be constantly expanding, much of this driven by the internet.

One of the interesting regional developments has been the appointment of David Watts, one of Australia’s leading, high profile privacy commissioners, to lead a U.N. study looking at big data and open data and how they affect the right to privacy globally. The study will investigate big data, its benefits and risks, and ideas for international best practice management. The report is due to be delivered to the U.N. General Assembly in October 2017.

Meanwhile, in New Zealand, the Ministry of Health has announced that there will be an electronic health record for all citizens by 2020. On 8 Aug. a major event will be hosted in New Zealand by the iappANZ to enable this plan to be explored, with a range of high profile speakers from the government and health care provider side, as well as from other perspectives, including patients and privacy.

There are also some great articles and links in this week’s Digest. At one end of the spectrum, we have an interesting article containing warnings from Hong Kong’s Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data warning about potential privacy risks with “Pokemon Go,” (not surprising given yet another two cases reported in this week’s Digest of large scale online gaming data breaches.)

At the other end of the spectrum, we have the U.S. National Security Agency’s Director of Civil Liberties and Privacy writing about her aspiration for NSA to foster a science of privacy. Hmm … both Oliver Stone and Edward Snowden have their doubts.

In launching his latest film, called “Snowden,” Stone shares his concerns about ‘surveillance capitalism’ and totalitarianism. Meanwhile Snowden himself and hacker Andy Huang, have announced plans to introduce designs for a new privacy-protecting smartphone case. Which they say will be great for journalists in repressive countries. Though they seem to overlook one of the other, and perhaps much more lucrative markets of, organised crime. Probably not what Oliver Stone had in mind when he put the words surveillance and capitalism together.

As an interesting counterpoint, this week’s Digest references an opinion piece in Motherboard, where the writer, who runs a data breach service advocates asking data breach brokers to give up their anonymity as a way of ascertaining whether they are operating legally. Interesting … there will be a number of privacy advocates who would question this train of logic; so it is a good article to read and ponder.

In another interesting piece highlighted in this week’s Digest, we have the Australian Dental Association using privacy arguments as a shield to protect dentists from health funds seeking to use transactional data to offer competing services. In a similar, but wonderfully old-school example (the only non-internet-related item I noticed in this week’s Digest!) we have a case of cut-price car insurance firms liaising with local auto service businesses to check whether car mileage and servicing histories of the cars they service are consistent with the details given by the car owners.