The Australian Government's Privacy Amendment (Enhancing Privacy Protection) Act 2012 was enacted on 29 November 2012 but will not commence until March 2014. It contains the first significant amendments to the Privacy Act 1988 since 2001. The whole process took nearly seven years since the...

Part I of this article is a Submission to the Australian Senate’s Finance and Public Administration Committee on the Exposure Draft of the Privacy Amendment Legislation submitted by the government to Parliament in 2010. The general thrust of the Submission is that the proposed Australian...

Part I of this article is a Submission to the Australian Senate’s Finance and Public Administration Committee on the Exposure Draft of the Privacy Amendment Legislation submitted by the government to Parliament in 2010. The general thrust of the Submission is that the proposed Australian...

Australia currently has IPPs (‘Information Privacy Principles’ - federal public sector) and NPPs (‘National Privacy Principles’ – most parts of the private sector). The Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) in its report on privacy (2008) recommended their replacement with eleven...

The purpose of this statement is to summarise the Australian Privacy Foundation’s position on each of the main international instruments concerning data privacy, stating which aspects of and uses of these instruments APF supports and opposes. The areas covered by the statement are as follows:...

The Obama Administration is offering the rest of the world a deal: ‘global interoperability’, comprising ‘mutual recognition and enforcement cooperation’. Perhaps we should read the small print. The ‘Framework’ initiative (Consumer data privacy in a networked world: A framework for...

The Privacy Amendment (Enhancing Privacy Protection) Bill 2012 is claimed by the Australian government to be a major ‘pro-privacy’ reform of Australia’s Privacy Act 1988. This article gives a brief explanation of why this is not so. The Bill strengthens the powers of the Privacy...

This report, supported by ACCAN the peak communications consumer organisation, is based on interviews, surveys and data analysis about the complaint handling processes of three regulators, Australian Communications and Media Authority, Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman and Australian Privacy...