The Privacy Amendment (Enhancing Privacy Protection) Bill 2012 passed today

The Privacy Amendment (Enhancing Privacy Protection) Bill 2012 passed today.

This substantially amends the Australian Privacy Act 1988. This is a big deal for Australian businesses. If you collect personal information (including surveillance video) and/or engage in direct marketing of any sort, you will need to understand your obligations (obviously I would be happy to do so for a fee). 

There will be work for businesses to do. A few high points:

• You will need to disclose more information at the time of collection of personal information
• It will be prudent to collect, at the time of collection, audit data about when, why, who collected the data. 
• I suspect a lot of (if not all) IT systems used for collection and storage will require changes to allow storage of the “audit data” and perhaps other information
• Changes to under 18s data collection
• All privacy policies will need to be redrafted since the National Privacy Principles are to become the Australian Privacy Principles, and there are substantial changes.

Short explanation is available at http://www.oaic.gov.au/news/media_releases/media_release_121129_privacy_changes.html

© 2012 Andrew Calvin, Sydney