Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) acknowledges the initial privacy reforms tabled today by the Attorney General but strongly urges more immediate, decisive, and comprehensive action to bring Australia’s privacy laws into the 21st century and to shine a bright light on our surveillance-based data-extraction digital economy.
While the long-awaited and passionately fought-for proposed statutory tort and children’s code are potentially positive steps, Australia remains far behind other nations in terms of data privacy as a fundamental human and digital right. After three years of consultation, this is a disappointing outcome for privacy rights affecting all Australians.
What Australia has been waiting for but did not get:
- Effective and fair people-powered consent: Re-defining consent to be freely given, specific, informed and an unambiguous indication of the person’s wishes, i.e. opt-in or express consent only.
- Properly defining personal information: The current definition of personal information has not kept up with technology and the practices of Big Tech, Big Data, Big Media, and others that profit from our personal information. It must be amended to include the regulation of online tracking technologies, individuation, use of location data, face/voice printing, and others.
- Removing antiquated exceptions: Regardless of size, nearly all organisations should be subject to privacy law. Small businesses often don’t know how to manage or protect personal information, collect too much of it, keep it for too long and have no legal obligation to tell you if they suffer a data breach, e.g. real estate agencies and the Rent-Tech industry are a clear target for reigning in here must all be covered by privacy laws. The small business exemption must go. Political parties have held an exception from being covered by privacy laws for 24 years, which also needs to stop. Employees similarly must be given the same rights and protections of their personal information as enjoyed by their organisation’s customers or clients. The small business, political party and employee records exceptions must all go.
- Fair and Reasonable Test: To ensure proportionality of personal information collection and limit unnecessary uses or disclosures of personal information, a fair and reasonable test must be introduced. The continued use of (flawed or forced) consent as some magical privacy wand must stop.
EFA’s Chair, John Pane, emphasised the urgency of these reforms:
“We call on the government to accelerate the remaining 100+ privacy law reforms and commit to delivering a Bill to the Australian people before the next federal election.”
“We are at risk of repeating the failure of the Morrison government in 2014 by not thoroughly modernising our privacy laws as the harms of poorly regulated technologies and business practices are becoming increasingly evident at a societal level across many demographic groups”.
“We need to learn from the experience of the European Union and European Economic Area countries who have successfully treated privacy as a fundamental human right. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation is a model of success for finding the right balance between privacy rights and the needs of business and government to collect and use our personal information. Why reinvent the wheel?”
About EFA
EFA is a national, membership-based, not-for-profit organisation that promotes and protects human rights in a digital context.
Media Contact
John Pane
[email protected]
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