Kirby chaired the group of OECD experts who, in 1980, drew up the guidelines that formed the basis of our Privacy Act and indeed the privacy codes of most other countries. These laws are rapidly becoming outdated.
One challenge comes from the demands of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Google, for example, is an AI business.
Momentous advances in AI have been enabled only through access to unlimited amounts of data on what humans actually do. This allows computers to mimic these actions through predicting how humans would act in response to any situation. There is a sinister aspect to this technology.
Harvard Professor Shoshana Zuboff has written of the dangers of "Big Brother Capitalism". This turns the famous "unseen hand" of the market, identified by economist Adam Smith, on its head. Instead of millions of consumer choices every day controlling the unknowing market, the market now knows our every move.
We are already familiar with behavioural advertising and Facebook has famously shown it can manipulate news-feeds. Our behaviour clearly can and almost certainly will be manipulated.
New rules addressing these problems have been drawn up in some countries. One is the idea of privacy by design and default in new technology - meaning genuine privacy safeguards must be factored in at the front-end.
To keep up, when New Zealand reforms its Privacy Act it should seriously consider requiring new technologies to be certified as "privacy-safe" in the same way that electrical devices and cars are certified.
Another idea is data portability - so a person can transfer their online profile between companies. Finally, there is the "right to be forgotten".
To work, however, any regulation needs to be global as no individual country can rein in the likes of Facebook or Google. This was recognised by the OECD when drawing up its rules in 1980, but of course these rules did not anticipate the Internet.
The architects of these rules, led by Kirby, were influenced by fundamental human values such as autonomy and free will. And we still hold dear these values: the right to make choices, to determine how we live - as long as we do not hurt others - and to make mistakes. Take these things away and we become just cogs in the machine.
It is up to privacy scholars around the world to come up with solutions that allow technological progress to take place, but not at the expense of our humanity.
