Shocking! A New Zealand website lets tenants see how many properties their landlord owns

A website at whatdoesmylandlordown.org (‘What does my landlord own?’) has recently gone viral because users can search their rental address to find out how many properties their landlord owns. Although the website uses publicly available information, the Privacy Foundation claims it still breaches relevant privacy laws and regulations.

Website screenshot

Privacy Foundation New Zealand secretary Kent Newman

 

Privacy Foundation New Zealand secretary Kent Newman said the website breached privacy laws and ethical standards and must be shut down as soon as possible. Its creator, who uses the name sunset_flowers, stressed that the website focused on whether rental properties met healthy homes standards and on making information about all properties owned by landlords publicly accessible. The website said it used publicly available information, allowing anyone to search any New Zealand address and see whether the landowner also owned other properties. It said this would bring tenants, tenant advocacy groups and relevant regulatory bodies together, helping them better understand landlords’ land ownership structures and strengthen oversight and accountability for unlawful and exploitative practices.

 

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Privacy Foundation secretary Newman disagreed. He said inequality in the distribution of income, assets and property ownership was a longstanding social problem in New Zealand, and solutions should come from legislators rather than tools that breached privacy provisions and principles. In other words, he believed the government should disclose information about properties that did not meet healthy homes standards, rather than individuals doing so. Otherwise, there was a risk of private information being misused. As we know, New Zealand has many public registers established for the public good. Misusing those registers would inevitably lead to additional safeguards being required and could undermine their immense value.

 

Newman stressed that the website must be held accountable for how it collected and used this private information. The website, however, said its information came from Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) and complied with the personal data licence. It also said it had no affiliation with LINZ or any other government agency.

 

 

“The case in support”

 

In a blog post last Friday, the website said it had made some privacy-related changes, including hiding the names of owners with a single property. Since launching on Wednesday, its popularity had far exceeded its creator’s expectations, repeatedly crashing its servers. It had also received far more enquiry emails than it could answer. The post added that the system did not support searches by name and was not indexed by search engines, meaning its content would not appear in results from search engines such as Google. The creator also said that users who did not know someone’s property address could not find any information about that person through the website.

 

“The case against”

 

Newman challenged the website’s accuracy, saying it had wrongly identified his father as the owner of an entire apartment building. He said there were ‘countless’ examples of inaccurate information on the website. For example, it could not distinguish between owners with the same name, such as John Smith, and could easily identify someone who owned only part of a multi-unit property as the owner of the entire building. He warned that this posed a serious threat to ordinary people’s personal safety and reputations.

 

Latest developments

 

On revisiting the website, the author found that it had closed. On its page, creator sunset_flowers expressed extreme dissatisfaction with Deputy Privacy Commissioner Liz MacPherson, accusing her of repeatedly making inaccurate statements under pressure from property owners and developers. The website had been created after seeing thousands upon thousands of ordinary New Zealanders forced to continue living in cold, damp, mouldy rental homes, with severe effects on their health and physical and mental wellbeing. Meanwhile, average rents repeatedly reached record highs, making life even harder for vulnerable people as living costs continued to rise. The creator said successive governments’ inaction had prompted them to establish the website, calling on everyone to work together to scrutinise those benefiting from rental income and ensure they met their responsibilities.