There is a version of the future where technology watches over your health, catches disease early, and fills the gaps left by an overstretched public system. There is another where that same technology becomes the most intimate surveillance infrastructure ever built. Both futures are arriving simultaneously… And New Zealand is underprepared for either.
The devices are already here. Wearable cardiac monitors, portable hormone tests, AI-powered cancer screening tools, and garments with textile-based sensors capable of medical-grade monitoring are moving from hospital wards to consumer shelves. As healthcare systems strain globally, people are increasingly self-monitoring, generating continuous streams of biometric data. Your fitness tracker knows your resting heart rate, your stress response, your sleep disruptions. Your insurance company would very much like to know those things too.
New Zealand’s Privacy Act was not designed with continuous biometric monitoring in mind, and it hasn’t been updated to account for it.
Meanwhile, a parallel infrastructure is being assembled by the state. NZ Police now have access to over 5,000 cameras owned by businesses, councils, and government agencies, accessible by 4,000 officers on their smartphones, with at least three councils currently using facial recognition. Police have acknowledged using BriefCam, which aggregates CCTV footage using facial recognition and licence plate tracking, compressing months of manual review into hours, alongside SearchX, an AI network-mapping tool, and Cellebrite, capable of extracting data from over 50 social media platforms from a single device. There is no legal framework in New Zealand specifically governing police use of AI, and the Algorithm Charter remains voluntary.
The pressure is sharpening. Health NZ currently carries around 8,000 vacancies, with the workforce gap projected to reach 25,000 healthcare professionals by the early 2030s. Against that backdrop, health technology isn’t a luxury, it’s a coming necessity. But we are adopting surveillance infrastructure without legal guardrails, and health monitoring technology without data sovereignty protections.
Researchers have warned that New Zealand has already built the architecture for mass or targeted surveillance, and that without major intervention, no framework can engender public confidence that its use is fair or lawful. The same applies to health data.
The infrastructure is being built now. We need answers before the architecture becomes permanent.
