Australian Privacy Commissioner gets a nice media makeover, er is the subject of deep insightful report the way it is currently done, over lunch

February 2, 2025 |

C’est chic to do an in depth piece by over an extravagantly priced breakfast or lunch. Not only does the reader get to know something about the subject but we get an insight of what the movers and shakers are eating and where they congregate to consume. The Australian Financial Review has recently published a profile of Carly Kind, the recently appointed Privacy Commissioner. This is something of a first for Privacy Commissioners. The most recent Information Commissioners (who covered privacy), Timothy Pilgrim (a pleasant but through and through public servant) and Angeline Falk (a long serving deputy in the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner), were not media averse as such. But their media forays were relatively few and brief. Usually confined to an interview on the ABC or quotes for other media. Their speeches at conferences were safe and predictable and certainly not designed to shake up the woeful privacy culture in the Australian marketplace. Even by the grey standards of Australian regulators they were distinctly in the background. Which was a shame. Privacy issues did not get ventilated as much as they should have. That is perhaps understandable given the generally ineffective regulation and enforcement of the Privacy Act. To be fair the last few years has seen a marked improvement in enforcement but has come off a low base and has not had a significant impact on the market yet.  And to be fair Pilgrim and Falk were marked improvements on their predecessors.

Carly Kind has had a good start as Privacy Commissioner.  A distinct up tick in enforcement action and more assertive commentary.  That she has a pedigree largely outside the Australian Public Service is a huge advantage.  She may be less hidebound by conservative self restraining litigation guidelines.  We can only hope given she has been handed even more enforcement powers in the most recent amendments to the Privacy Act late last year. In this article she was candid in criticising poor public policy which has led to privacy invasive practices.  As I have been writing about for years.  She needs to bring high profile actions which puts high profile privacy breaching companies into the media spotlight.  This is a common approach of ASIC and the ACCC.  That is the only way of changing the culture in the market place.

The article gives some restrained hope that the coming years will see more effective and high profile regulation of privacy breaches.  It is well overdue.

The article provides:

My lunch with the Australian Privacy Commissioner, Carly Kind, begins with a confession.

“I tried to stalk you on social media on my Uber on the way,” I say as she sits down at Manly’s Noon café, bike helmet in hand.

Looking up other people’s social media is something everyone does but no one should ever admit to, particularly not to the woman charged with protecting the nation’s privacy by upholding the Privacy Act of 1988.

Kind is taken aback and for a moment, I think I’ve blown it before we’ve even ordered a coffee, let alone lunch.

“Did you find anything interesting?” she responds after what feels like an age.

No. She is on Instagram and on Facebook. But both attempts to glean any information of value were foiled despite me being a Millennial journalist well versed in the art of lurking.

Privacy Commissioner Carly Kind admits she’s less idealistic about the role of regulation in protecting online privacy and worries one day big tech will decide not to obey the law.  

Her Instagram is set to private. Her Facebook isn’t locked but the only photo I can click on is of the back of her head. I did manage to deduce she has 737 Facebook friends, but there are no workplaces, relationships, or really any other information to show.

When I lament my efforts were dashed, she’s nonchalant, “I really don’t use Facebook these days, but I can’t get rid of it because of Marketplace.”

I feel seen immediately.

Kind is also on LinkedIn, X and its latter-day rival BlueSky, where she plugs the goings-on of the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner – the independent federal government agency of which the Privacy Commissioner role is part – and gives privacy protection advice.

She’s not on TikTok but says her abstention is motivated solely by concerns over her time and not privacy.

“I don’t have an ideological objection to TikTok any more than my objection to all the other big tech players, which is quite strong, but I don’t have time for that much scrolling,” she says.

We meet the week after President Donald Trump’s second inauguration to the White House, amid pathetic sights of big tech’s desperation to ingratiate themselves with the new regime.

As we begin to discuss how these developments could affect Australia, a waiter approaches to take our orders. We haven’t looked at the menu but Kind immediately orders a “cold brew slushy”.

I have no idea what that is but follow suit. We’re soon presented with two gigantic glasses of caffeinated shaved ice that are somehow sweet and bitter at the same time.

Kind disagrees with the idea of banning TikTok just because it’s owned by China. She says it’s been interesting watching the US go through exactly what the rest of the world has experienced since Silicon Valley birthed social media.

“I don’t disagree with the premise that access to immense amounts of data on a cache of citizens is a form of power, particularly if an app can also shape the content they receive. But TikTok’s practices are not markedly different from other social media platforms owned by the US,” Kind says.

I ask her if this means privacy is dead. She says, perhaps predictably, that it isn’t.

“I think people care a lot about privacy but they feel they don’t have any agency to do anything about it, particularly if the only way they think they’ll get it is by getting off Facebook or Google,” she says.

I can see our polite waiter hovering again and suggest we look at the menu before delving any further into the murky world of tech politics.

Kind selects scrambled eggs and adds a serving of bacon with an admission she’s trying to eat more protein.

I ask her if it’s because that’s what everyone’s doing on TikTok and she looks at me strangely before cautioning me against taking dietary advice from social media.

I go with the zucchini toast.

Until tech companies blatantly refuse to comply, I don’t think we can give up hope in the belief that regulation can shape their behaviour.

Kind apologises for selecting her favourite local café instead of one of the many fancy restaurants in the CBD which often grace the pages of AFR Weekend. She says she was reprimanded by her husband for not putting much thought into it.

“To be honest, I just chose somewhere close that I actually like, but then Eric said the choice says a lot about you!”

I think a laid-back café in Manly with its fancy coffee slushy suits Kind.

The 41-year-old is frank about the difficulty of corralling the world’s biggest technology companies into respecting Australia’s privacy … or anything at all.

She even admits the job of privacy commissioner is a lot harder than she thought it would be when she uprooted her young family from their home in London in February last year to take the job.

Kind is quick to admit she’s yet to face the bulk of privacy challenges that come with raising three children because they’re not old enough to know what social media is, let alone want to be on it. Her husband Eric also happens to be a privacy lawyer, which seems like an unfair advantage.

Still, their eldest son is only 5 years old and the seeds of privacy invasion are already being planted.

The couple have opted to exclude his image from being published online by his school but Kind worries about him becoming isolated because he is often removed from group activities as a result.

“We are already seeing that we’re forced into a tech ecosystem we don’t really have the ability to opt out of,” she says.

The daycare her younger children attend use apps that monitor them throughout the day and send parents regular photographic updates. She says these sorts of apps aren’t very secure, and agreeing to their use is just one of many uncomfortable decisions forced upon parents as their children grow.

Kind argues Australians should be able to exercise their privacy rights without being forced to deactivate social media, or withdraw from other online platforms.

And just to prove that the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner really is independent of government, Kind says she’s against the Albanese government’s plan to ban children from accessing social media platforms before they turn 16. The measure, she says, rests on a premise we should not accept: that social media is inherently a bad place for children.

“Why do we allow that? We could prohibit the use of personal data to target children at all,” she says. “We could prohibit interpersonal data sharing or require social feeds to be designed in particular ways to prevent problematic content.

“Instead we’ve just accepted it’s a no-go zone and by blocking children we allow the platforms themselves to remain unsafe.”

Kind believes children will inadvertently end up on more depraved corners of the internet if the ban goes ahead, in search of new places to connect. For instance, they may try out virtual private networks to skirt the ban, thus potentially exposing themselves to sites otherwise blocked in Australia.

Kind says recent decrees from tech billionaires, vowing to put the weight of their trillion-dollar platforms behind fighting foreign governments, is a bleak turning point. Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg recently pledged to support President Donald Trump in his attempts to rein in other countries who “go after” US tech firms, and fellow billionaire Elon Musk has been attempting to call the shots in Europe for months.

“Until tech companies blatantly refuse to comply, I don’t think we can give up hope in the belief that regulation can shape their behaviour,” she says.

I ask her, somewhat self-servingly, if there’s any point attempting to assert one’s right to online privacy when the bulk of their youth was spent posting every thought on Facebook, or Tumblr and all the other social media platforms that have since disappeared into the ether.

She doesn’t seem to hold any judgment for the way younger Millennials or Gen Z have been raised on the internet but urges all users to not be fatalistic about the importance of privacy.

“It’s a real shame that we thought the way to prepare children for the digital age was about teaching them to code and not how to protect their privacy,” Kind says.

Carly Kind thinks trying to ban kids from social media might lead them to darker corners of the internet. 

She says poor policy has let the country down, and it’s not just children on social media who are being affected by data breaches or privacy encroachment.

She encourages me to push back on retailers, who ask for endless amounts of personal information in exchange for their goods, as a simple way to start exercising data protections. Most small businesses are not covered by the Privacy Act and are often the source of data leaks.

Kind got into privacy law in 2013 after US whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed thousands of classified documents to journalists about the mass cyber surveillance efforts of the US and UK governments.

Over the past 12 years she’s worked for the United Nations Office of Human Rights in Geneva, not-for-profit privacy defender Privacy International, and most recently at London’s Ada Lovelace Institute, an independent research body with a mission to ensure artificial intelligence works for humanity.

 
 
 

But she can’t point to any country that has the privacy protections balance right and actually thinks it may be about to get worse.

She points to signs of capitulation to big tech in other jurisdictions, including the European Union which was once considered the bastion of privacy law.

“We’re now in a new era where we can’t rely on corporations to protect consumer rights, or the state,” she says.

This is because many of the privacy-encroaching companies governments now seek to control are more powerful than any other in history, with turnovers equal to the size of state economies.

“They have built fighting regulation into the cost of doing business,” she says.

The federal government recently unveiled the first tranche of reforms to the Privacy Act, which emboldened Kind last year to determine retailer Bunnings contravened the law by collecting individual’s sensitive information without their consent or knowledge.

But even with stronger laws, Kind admits her faith in the existing system to protect privacy has weakened.

“It’s an increasingly wicked problem. Politics and policymaking is getting very complicated, and we probably do need to think about new tools as well as applying the old ones,” she says.

Despite this, she says she does not regret taking the job.

“Seeing how the sausage is made and the limitations of affecting change has been helpful … even if it’s not as easy as I thought it would be, but it doesn’t make me want to abandon the cause,” she says.

 
 
 

We’re finished with our food and Kind admits to wanting to go for a swim to shake off the existential sense of dread I’ve injected after almost two hours of questioning about the point of her job.

I attempt to exercise my privacy rights by opting for a paper receipt and inadvertently force the café’s manager to struggle with reams of paper for at least 15 minutes before she can clasp our meagre bill into my sheepish hands.

As Kind could attest, being private in 2025 is no mean feat.

The bill

Noon, 18 Raglan St Manly

2x Cold brew slushy x2: $18.00

Zucchini toast: $18.00

Scrambled eggs with bacon: $25.50

Total: $61.50

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