Peter A Clarke

It has long been known that the legislation in place to regulate the collection, use and protection of personal information is both porous, with many exceptions, and incomplete, not covering all organisations that collect personal information.

Even with these chronic problems with privacy legislation, the Medical Republic has discovered and reported on a government practice of releasing medical records to police without the need for a warrant or court order.  The process is entirely administrative, without any right of review by the person whose data is being provided to police.  The Guardian has also reported on the issue in Australian government secretly releasing sensitive medical records to police.

I provided comment on this little known scheme, amongst other privacy experts.

This process covering medical records held under the medical benefits and pharmaceutical benefits scheme completely undermines the protections that are supposed to reside in the Privacy Act. It is anachronous that Read the rest of this entry »

California’s much touted, and feared in some quarters, privacy law is now 2 days old and the West Coast of the USA has not slid into the sea. The Attorney General of California has set out the operation of the California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA) here with a short fact sheet.

It is common practice in the United States for significant law reform to emanate from the States and then for the Federal Government to legislate to cover the field and generally supersede those state laws.  That is particularly the case where the law applies to commerce that crosses state boundaries, clearly a federal law.  Often times that is done to establish uniformity and avoid duplication and efficiency.  Also states tend to be incubators for public policy experimentation.  Successful policies tend to get picked up and adopted federally.  That happened with welfare reform in the 1990s.  That occasionally occurred in Australia however the States are rarely so ambitious these days and are content to have the Commonwealth organise uniformity through the COAG process, amongst other fora.  The problem is that the genius of experimenting with new concepts has been suppressed for the sake of sameness.  In the area of privacy that has resulted in a dismal Federal Act and Read the rest of this entry »