The Australian federal government released a Discussion Paper discussing possible amendments to the Privacy Act 1988 in October 2021. They include potentially the most extensive proposed changes to the Privacy Act since the inclusion of the private sector in its scope (2000). Many factors make...

Many companies are not satisfied with collecting only the personal information that customers provide during a transaction or sign-up, or even the additional personal information they collect about the customer’s activities on the company’s own website or app. Instead, there is a common...

Representations in online privacy policies that certain data is anonymous or “not information that personally identifies you” can have significant consequences. They may indicate that the firm considers the data to be outside the scope of data protection regulation, and/or give consumers the...

This submission in response to the ACCC General Online Retail Marketplaces Issues Paper provides an analysis of the privacy terms offered by four key general online retail marketplaces in Australia (incl Amazon and eBay), to offer some assessment of both:• the quality of privacy terms offered...

In 2020, the Australian government produced a novel proposal to legislate to require designated digital platforms – initially Google and Facebook – to compensate news media businesses for news content. Although a handful of other jurisdictions had already used copyright regulation to require...

This article argues that the degradation of consumer data privacy in the digital environment causes objective detriment to consumers and undermines the competitive process, and should therefore be of critical concern to competition authorities. It is notorious that consumers are frequently...

The ad tech sector is founded on consumers’ personal data. Technological advances have provided growing opportunities for firms to profit by predicting, prompting, manipulating and measuring consumers’ behaviour on a daily basis. This has led publishers, marketers and ad tech service...

The new Australian law against misuse of market power (as amended in 2017) shares a number of similarities with the Canadian law against abuse of dominance. This article makes a comparative analysis of these laws against unilateral anti-competitive conduct, highlighting their similarities,...

This submission responds to the Final Report of the Review into Open Banking in Australia released by Treasury on 9 February 2018. The proposed ‘Open Banking' regime, if implemented, will be the first incarnation of the broader ‘Open Data' regime proposed for Australia. The Productivity...

In August 2017, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) launched a public consultation concerning a new licensing regime for authorised deposit-taking institutions (ADI). This article argues that the new Restricted ADI licences proposed by APRA should, if implemented, serve to...