The UTS Human Technology Institute welcomes the Albanese Government’s new privacy reform Bill as a first step in strengthening Australia’s federal Privacy Act. Much more reform is needed to make Australia’s privacy protections adequate for the 21st century.
The Bill will allow anyone affected by a serious invasion of privacy to seek justice in a court of law. This will protect people from some of the worst forms of privacy breach. - Professor Edward Santow, HTI Co-Director
"The Bill also recognises that children can be particularly vulnerable to having their privacy violated online. We support the Australian Privacy Commissioner developing a new Children’s Online Privacy Code to protect kids from a range of harms that kids experience simply by sharing their personal information online."
More reform needed
While the Bill is an important first step, much more is needed to modernise our privacy law for the 21st century. In February 2023, the Government committed to implementing over 100 reforms to the Privacy Act. While this Bill starts to implement this commitment, it includes just 20 percent of the Government’s committed reforms.
This Bill does not address some of the most urgent and serious problems with our Privacy Act. For example, the Bill doesn’t address the problem of ‘sham consent’ – where an individual’s privacy rights are waived simply because they had to click ‘I consent’ to access an important service online.
“People regularly sign away their privacy rights without giving free and informed consent. The Government committed to addressing this by creating a new ‘fair and reasonable’ requirement regarding the collection and use of people’s personal information. It also committed to creating special rules for high-risk technologies, like facial recognition technology, but this has not been included in today’s Bill.” said Sophie Farthing, Head of the Policy Lab at the Human Technology Institute.
Australia is falling dangerously behind other countries in protecting the right to privacy. The Albanese Government must commit to a specific timetable to introduce a bill that fulfils its remaining privacy law reform commitments, no later than six months after the upcoming Federal Election. - Sophie Farthing, Head of Policy Lab, HTI