Business and Government have had a long time to get used to the Australian Privacy Act. It’s one of those things that at the very essence of it – is not too difficult to grasp. If you are capturing information for a specific purpose, and the person giving you that information hasn’t given you express permission to use it in any other way – don’t.
There are many companies who get around this, the major banks, Telstra, Optus… pretty much any major institution has a clause in their contracts requiring you to forgo any protection offered to you by the Privacy Act 1988, if you want to do business with them. This particular undertaking by these institutions is of interest because, you can never sign a contract waiving your rights afforded to you by law – it’s just not possible. So – how these companies get away with it, confuses me.
One particular point of annoyance for me comes from the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsmen. The TIO does a fantastic job, and I applaud their work. One thing they don’t do well, is protect the privacy of their members. Several times (most recently this week) emails have been sent out to every TIO member, listing the email address of every other TIO member. Once is forgivable, but repeated breaches of privacy should be dealt with. The TIO has displayed an inability to deal with it themselvs, so perhaps somebody external needs to come in and facilitate some process changes.
[EDIT] The original leaking of all member details was not direclty via the TIO. It was an email from ACMA to all members of the TIO.
