New Zealand’s Office of the Privacy Commissioner has been surveying the country about privacy every year, and the numbers from 2024 through 2026 tell a story I find hard to ignore — partly because they describe the exact people I’m building for, and partly because the OPC gave its 2025 Privacy Week the theme “Privacy on Purpose.” That phrase is a better description of PresenceOS than anything I’ve written myself.
Here are the numbers, with sources, because a claim without a source is just a vibe.
What the surveys actually found
From the OPC’s 2024 biennial survey:
- 82% of New Zealanders want the right to ask a business to delete their personal information.
- 83% want to know when their personal information is used in automated decision-making.
- 80% want more control and choice over how their information is collected and used.
From the 2025 annual survey:
- 67% said they would likely change service providers if they heard their provider had poor privacy and security practices.
And the 2026 annual survey, released this year, shows the trend still climbing:
- 71% are concerned about children’s privacy, including their use of social media — up 4% in a year.
- 67% are concerned about government and businesses using AI to make decisions about them — up 5%.
- 65% are concerned about how social media companies handle their personal information.
- 82% want more say in how their information is collected and used.
- Only 18% are very or extremely confident that New Zealand law adequately protects their personal information.
Privacy stopped being a niche worry for the tinfoil-hat crowd. Four out of five people in this country are asking for something the mainstream industry has no intention of giving them, because giving it to them would dismantle the business model.
”Delete my information” — deletion as architecture, not a request form
On the big platforms, the right to deletion is a web form, a waiting period, and a promise you can’t verify. On PresenceOS, deletion is a property of how the system is built. When you delete a contact, you’re deleted from their device at the same moment — both directions, every time. Messages are end-to-end encrypted, so there is no readable copy of your conversations sitting on a server for you to beg back. Backups are encrypted and live on devices you choose — family, not a data centre. There’s no form to fill in because there’s no warehouse of you to empty.
”Tell me when a machine decides things about me” — the easiest disclosure I’ll ever write
83% of New Zealanders want to be told when their data feeds automated decision-making. Here is PresenceOS’s full disclosure on that subject: it doesn’t. There is no feed ranking, no recommendation engine, no profiling, no ad auction deciding what you see next. The phone shows you your messages, your calls, your music, and your photos, in the order they happened. Nobody’s model gets a vote.
The 67% who would walk — walking needs somewhere to go
Two in three people say they’d consider switching over poor privacy practices. I believe them. The reason more haven’t is that “switching” has meant choosing between two ecosystems with the same appetite. PresenceOS runs on real hardware you can hold — the moto g56 5G that every screenshot on this site comes from — and the Guardian Companion app keeps you connected to family on their existing Android phones. (The iPhone version of the Companion is still on the bench, and I’ve written honestly about where that stands.) Switching only becomes real when there’s a destination. That’s the whole project.
71% worry about their kids — so do I
This is the number that matters most to me, and it’s the one going up. Children’s privacy is not a feature I bolted on for market fit; it’s the reason PresenceOS exists at all. A child on PresenceOS has no ad profile, no engagement loop tuned to keep them scrolling at 1am, and no stranger able to add them from across the world — contacts are made by physically tapping phones together, face to face, and a guardian is part of the picture by design. Essential functions, done properly, instead of a slot machine with a SIM card.
Only 18% trust the law to protect them — don’t wait for the law
That last statistic might be the most important one. People want these rights, and they don’t believe legislation will deliver them. I think they’re right to be sceptical, and my answer is to not make you wait: a privacy policy is a promise, but architecture is a guarantee. If the server never holds your conversations, no policy change, breach, or acquisition can hand them over later. That’s privacy on purpose — built in, not promised.
If those survey numbers describe you, the download page and the order page are where this stops being a blog post.
