The Financial Rights Legal Centre, Consumer Action Law Centre, and Financial Counselling Australia have banded together to challenge current privacy laws in Australia.

These consumer groups provided a joint submission to the Attorney-General’s Department Privacy Act Review arguing that reform of the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) (Act) is necessary to mitigate against the exploitation of consumers by big data businesses in the current digital age. According to the consumer groups, our saturated digital economy is rife with exploits and pitfalls and the current state of privacy regulation is arguably insufficient to adequately protect Australian’s privacy rights.

According to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner’s Community Attitudes to Privacy Survey 2020, Australians:

• consider the protection of their personal information to be a major concern in their life (70%)

• would like the government to do more to protect the privacy of their data (83%)

• want to be protected against harmful practices (84%)

• want increased rights around certain issues such as asking businesses to delete information (84%)

• want the right to seek compensation in the courts for a breach of privacy (78%)

• want to know when their personal information is used in automated decision-making if it could affect them (77%)

• want the right to object to certain data practices while still being able to access and use the service (77%)

• are concerned about their children’s privacy (91%), and

• do not want companies sharing their information for secondary purposes (81%).

Consequently, this joint submission proposes to ameliorate these issues by updating key terms in the Act, namely, enhancing protections to personal information, increasing privacy standards, establishing a right to erasure, improving privacy transparency, and addressing fragmented regulatory and legislative regimes concerning privacy.

Additionally, the consumer groups have made a push to limit large businesses from blindly collecting consumer data. This ties into the recent Government address towards Amazon’s surveillance practices as well as the current review of the mandatory data retention regime.

Financial Rights CEO, Karen Cox, summed up this issue by providing that ‘the concept of consent has been rendered completely meaningless when it comes to protecting our privacy.’ It is necessary that the privacy regime now reflects consumer rights to a level of ‘real life protection…rather than a cloak of legitimacy for poor practices and exploitation.’

For a detailed reading see here.