Privacy was invented by John Privacy in 1753, when he decided he would no longer spy on his neighbours. It caught on slowly at first. His neighbours, having lost their main source of entertainment, went back to spying on each other, and the idea did not reach New Zealand until 1993, when Parliament passed a law about it.
At The Civilian, we would like to honour his legacy, and the work of New Zealand’s tireless Privacy Commissioners. This page explains what this website collects when you read it, why it collects it, and what you can ask us to do about it. It is written for New Zealand’s Privacy Act 2020.
The short version
- You can read every story without an account, a sign-up, or a cookie.
- We count visits with our own statistics tool, on our own server. It uses no cookies and builds no profile of you.
- Our pages load nothing from anyone else’s servers. Share buttons are plain links: nothing is sent to Facebook, X or anyone else unless you click one.
- We do not sell, rent or trade information about readers, and we run no advertising trackers.
- You can ask us what we hold about you and ask us to correct it. Because we keep so little, there may be nothing that identifies you.
Sir Bruce Slane, New Zealand’s first Privacy Commissioner, started the Office with little more than a new law and a firm belief that what you get up to is your own business.
Who we are
The Civilian is responsible for the information described here. Our privacy officer handles privacy questions and requests. Email nz.thecivilian@gmail.com.
What we collect when you read the site
Server logs
Like every website, ours runs on a server that keeps a short technical record of each request: your IP address, the page you asked for (including any search words), the time, your browser’s description of itself and the page that linked you here. These logs are on our own server, hosted by DigitalOcean, and we use them to keep the site running and secure (for example, to spot attacks). They are deleted after 14 days. We do not use them to identify readers.
Cloudflare
Every request to the site passes first through Cloudflare, a company whose network sits between readers and our server. It delivers our pages quickly and stops attacks before they reach us. To do that it handles the same technical details as our server logs, under its own privacy policy. It sets no cookies on our pages and adds nothing to them, though it does ask your browser to let it know if a page fails to load.
Visitor statistics
We count how many people read each story, and where they came from, with Matomo, which runs on our own server. Nothing about your visit goes to an analytics company.
It sets no cookies and builds no profile of you. For each page it records the page, the time, the site that linked you here, and your browser’s description of itself, which tells us the type of device and browser. Before anything is stored, the last two parts of your IP address are removed, so it no longer points to you, and only that shortened address is used, for example to estimate your country. Search pages are counted without the words you searched for. If your browser asks websites not to track you (“Do Not Track”), we do not count your visit at all. The visit-by-visit records are deleted after 90 days; we keep only the totals. That is the whole of it.
Search
When you search the archive, we use your search words to find matching stories. They are not stored anywhere except, like any page request, in the server logs above.
Dame Marie Shroff led the Office for more than a decade and in all that time read nobody’s diary. That we know of. Which is rather the point.
Photo: New Zealand Government, Office of the Governor-General, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)
Cookies
Readers get none. The only cookies the site sets are the ones WordPress needs to keep our own editors signed in while they work.
John Edwards, Commissioner from 2014 to 2021, went on to look after Britain’s privacy as well. We like to think he practised on us first.
Photo: PrivacyMaven, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Sharing a story
The share buttons under each story are ordinary links to Facebook, Reddit, X, Bluesky, WhatsApp and email. They load nothing from those services while you read. If you click one, you go to that service, and its own privacy policy applies from there. When anyone shares a link to The Civilian, the service they share it on may fetch the story’s headline and image to show a preview; that request comes from the service, not from you.
If you contact us
If you email us, we use your message and address to deal with it and reply, and we keep the correspondence only as long as we need it for that. We do not add you to any list.
If you appear in a story
Our stories are about public life and the people in it. If a story names or identifies you and you are not a public figure, or something in it concerns your privacy, contact our privacy officer and we will look at it.
Where information is kept
The site, its server logs and our visitor statistics are on a server hosted by DigitalOcean in Australia. Every request passes through Cloudflare’s network, which is run from the United States and has servers around the world, including in New Zealand. Where a provider is outside New Zealand, we use only providers bound to protect information to standards comparable to the Privacy Act.
Keeping it safe
Pages are served over an encrypted connection (HTTPS). Only our editors can sign in to the site, and the private parts of the site are closed to everyone else. We keep what we hold to the minimum described on this page.
Your rights
Under the Privacy Act 2020 you can ask whether we hold information about you, ask to see it, and ask us to correct it. Email our privacy officer at nz.thecivilian@gmail.com. We will respond as soon as we reasonably can, and within 20 working days. There is no charge.
If you are not happy with how we have handled your information or your request, please tell us first so we can try to put it right. You can also complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner at privacy.org.nz.
Michael Webster, Commissioner since 2022. Have you heard of him? Exactly.
Photo: Office of the Governor General of New Zealand, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)
Changes to this policy
If what we collect changes, for example if we start a newsletter, we will update this page before we start, and change the date below.
Last updated 6 November 2026.
John Privacy died in 1781, surrounded by his family, none of whom were watching.