Peter A Clarke

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 »

Wired reports that Google has paid $22.5million to the FTC in a fine over violation of a privacy consent decree.

The article provides:

Google has reportedly agreed to pay a record $22.5 million fine to the Federal Trade Commission to settle charges that it violated a privacy consent decree it signed with the agency, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

Google, which signed a 20-year privacy agreement with the FTC following the ill-fated Google Buzz, was investigated for using a sneaky, but well-known, tactic to bypass the strong default cookie settings on Apple’s Safari browser. Google defended the practice, saying it was simply trying to put a +1 button on Google Ads that could be used by signed-in Google users.

The proposed fine – one of the largest ever levied by the FTC – won’t hurt Google’s bottom line – at least not in the short term – but it’s a major PR loss for the search giant, which is battling with regulators in the States and in Europe over its privacy practices and accusations that it abuses its near-monopoly on search.

As privacy violations go, the Safari cookie workaround was rather minor, but little missteps by Google give authorities a way to publicly punish the company and try to force the company to be much more deliberate about privacy. Facebook Read the rest of this entry »

Telstra and privacy breaches goes together like Ginger and Fred and Bacon and Eggs.

The Australian ran a story, Telstra rings up a new privacy bungle about the privacy breach which while the Age in ‘Customer privacy is not negotiable’: Telstra boss admits leaking customer data shows that the problem is not a fleeting and passing issue.  There may be a cultural problem.

The article provides:

Telstra CEO David Thodey Read the rest of this entry »

In Is Privacy Worth the Loss of Opportunity? the author pithily sets out the dilema of applying for a position when connected to social media, listed on Google and searchable through other on line fora, such as Twitter.  Matters relevant to a job application are not on your average Facebook page.  A private life does not have any real relevance to one’s performance at work.  There are the occasional exceptions, some security agency positions.

The article provides:

As information security Read the rest of this entry »