Peter A Clarke

The perceived need for the visual footage can drive a news crew to do all sorts of things, most of it appallingly distasteful.  Like buzzing overhead in a chopper and peering down on Linda Goldspink -Lord while she was at the body of her 13 year old daughter Molly Lord on her farm. The facts as reported reek of intrusions into a deeply private space.  Appalling behaviour is a given here but probably an intereference with privacy.

It provides:

Channel Seven has apologised to a mother who lost her teenage daughter in a quad-bike accident almost two weeks ago after her criticism of its news crew was removed from its Facebook page.

Linda Goldspink-Lord wrote of her anger on the Seven News Sydney Facebook page in a post that attracted more than 32,000 “likes” before it was removed.

She alleged the news station filmed her with the body of her 13-year-old daughter Molly Lord from a helicopter above a property at Kembla Grange, near Wollongong on July 11.

“I would just like to let everyone know of the pain and harassment we suffered as a result of channel 7,” she wrote.

“A reporter was on our private property very soon after the accident Read the rest of this entry »

Last Friday the Herald Sun ran a report McDonald’s says hi-tech specs ‘sparked privacy fears’.  The article has a bit of the gosh golly geez to it but it does raise a very important issue.  People are concerned about visual recording devices in their midst, particularly when not mounted as a CCTV (though I think there is enough concern about them as well.  There tends to be one side of the topic reported on those issues).

It provides:

MCDONALD’S workers in Paris who stopped a Canadian professor from wearing computerised eyeglasses feared he could be recording or photographing people in violation of their privacy, the company has said. Read the rest of this entry »

In today’s punch Lisa Cairpis has written a fascinating article titled Who’s surveilling the surveillance cops?

It provides:

Last week I was grilled by Derryn Hinch of 3AW Drive fame about my legal complaint against Victoria Police for their retention of footage taken of me at a peaceful protest in 2010. Derryn wanted to know what I was so concerned. “If you’ve done nothing wrong, if you’ve got nothing to hide, then why does it bother you?”, he was basically asking.

Three’s a crowd… At a certain point, this all gets a little over the top

It’s not just about the mere fact that there is footage of me. I’m also concerned about the logic that runs behind the very act of collecting and holding on to the footage. I am worried about the ways in which that footage could be used, or combined with other footage and information collected from other events, if indeed it can be retained.

The Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) last week heard arguments about the retention of footage of me by Victoria Police. The potential intelligence value of that footage was one reason put forward as to why the police cannot destroy the footage or de-identify my image. The Tribunal will make a decision in the coming months about whether the reasons given by the police are consistent with Victoria’s privacy and human rights laws.

This case, however, is just one sliver of a broader surveillance issue that should create concern for privacy and democratic rights.

Last week the government released proposals Read the rest of this entry »

Calls for a statutory right to privacy had been made periodically for at least 10 years in one report or another of law reform commissions.  Much longer if calls by academics, activists or just those interested in the area are taken into account. The 2008 Australian Law Reform Commission is the latest and loudest call for such a right.  Around this time last year it looked like the issue wasn’t just going to be kicked down the road.  The Federal Government looked like it was seriously going to both look at and implement some form of a  statutory right to privacy.   AM reported a new found interest in the issue.  It stated:

The Sydney Morning Herald’s article Data trail easy to follow for Big Brother is an early foray into the Attorney General’s data retention discussion paper.  It provides:

“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

It builds a massive dossier on everyone at millisecond resolution, and creates more work and challenges for law enforcement to catch actual criminals. 

Andrew Lewman, Tor’s executive director

Thus spake the world’s First Digital Citizen, Google supremo Eric Schmidt, during an American television interview in 2009.

Unsurprisingly Read the rest of this entry »

The World Today reports on an egregious interference with defence personnel privacy in Defence investigates privacy leak.

It provides:

SHELEY HALL: The Defence Department has launched a formal investigation into the release of personal information about thousands of former service men and women by one of its agencies.

The information of almost 2,500 former personnel was inadvertently attached to an email survey sent to other former members, even though the department’s software initially blocked the email as a security breach.

Defence says it’s treating the matter Read the rest of this entry »

The Economist has recently run a number of fascinating pieces on Data Privacy in the US and Europe.  In Out of shape the focus is on ever expanding demand on service providers (and others) for data.

It provides:

SNOOPING, like so many things in life, is going mobile and online. In 2011 Google received 12,271 requests for data Read the rest of this entry »

The Canberra Times reports on the ACT Auditor General’s concerns about privacy controls over patient records at the Canberra Hospital.  The report is found here.

It provides:

The privacy of hundreds of thousands of patient records at the Canberra Hospital was vulnerable to compromise because of the poor quality of data management in the Emergency Department, according to the Auditor General.

Auditor-General Maxine Cooper told an Assembly Committee this morning that Read the rest of this entry »

The Age has run a long piece on data mining (found here). The privacy implications of unrestricted data mining has been well known for some time.  The scope for abuse of a database is significant, particularly when it contains financial details such as credit card numbers etc…  Even addresses, phone numbers and other identifiers provide the raw material for identity theft and fraud.

The article provides:

You’re walking by a shop you’ve been to in the past. Your mobile phone beeps and you find a text message offering you a discount if you buy something in the next 15 minutes.

Is it a great offer or an unwanted intrusion?

Are you happy that the phone company and the retailer know enough about you to create personalised marketing?

Or do you find it creepy that you can’t walk down the street in peace?

Advances in technology Read the rest of this entry »

Jennifer Urban, Chris Jay Hoofnagle and Su Li of University of California at Berkeley have conducted a survey of Americans on their attitudes towards Mobile Phones and privacy.  It is found here.

It is a very interesting report. It confirms what many interested in privacy law have known for a long time, despite what Facebook, Google and on line providers say for most people Privacy Matters.  That the law has not caught up with providing proper privacy protections is trite.  But the inertia in trying to bridge that gap is significant and chronic.

The conclusion of the report are worth reproducing.  They are:

The overall picture we developed from responses to this survey suggests that Americans both use a wide variety of mobile phone features and services that collect a rich set of personal information, and assign a strong privacy interest to that information. This includes the younger age cohorts who are most quickly adopting smartphones and their richest features.
At the same time, the market has produced few realistic, privacy-protective alternatives to the dominant, privacy-invasive online services.    Greater transparency and consent requirements could help, but only if consumers can realistically make decisions that align more closely with their preferences for privacy than many of the value propositions available in the market today.
Under our current regulatory regime, firms can and do cram questionable demands for contact lists and other sensitive information in disclosures. This issue is exacerbated by the fact that providing meaningful, descriptive notices is genuinely difficult in most mobile environments. Firms also sometimes condition rendition of service on disproportionate demands for personal data.
The gulf between private sector information demands and consumer preferences suggest that better disclosures and choice mechanisms alone will simply preserve the status quo. More aggressive interventions are necessary to create incentives for firms to reduce collection of personal information.
Particularly where privacy tradeoffs have not been made clear, consumers need Read the rest of this entry »