Australia’s first privacy class action settles
On 9 December 2019 the Supreme Court of NSW approved a settlement of a class action alleging invasion of privacy (the first Australian case of this kind). read more…
Way more than an everyday interest in IP
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On 9 December 2019 the Supreme Court of NSW approved a settlement of a class action alleging invasion of privacy (the first Australian case of this kind). read more…
Because data is intangible and not protected by a single legal doctrine the law struggles to fashion appropriate remedies when data has been copied or ‘stolen’ in an unauthorised manner. The High Court of Australia faced this issue in a hearing on 12 and 13 November 2019 involving a challenge to the validity of a search warrant – leading to the Court wondering whether the journalist was asking the Court to recognise a tort of invasion of privacy in Australian law. read more…
Late last week the Full Federal Court delivered what should be the final word in a long-running dispute between the Privacy Commissioner and Telstra about whether data generated within a telecommunications network in the course of transmitting calls and other messages should be treated as “personal information” under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth). The case read more…
Many regulators take an expansive view of their remit, and the Australian Privacy Commissioner has acted in this way in the Ashley Madison case. The Ashley Madison data security breach attracted enormous publicity worldwide, when details of approximately 36 million subscribers were published by hacktivists operating under the monicker “The Impact Team”. The company that read more…
Recent publicity about an Australian university’s practice of tracking the location of people connected to the university’s wi-fi network raises a mixture of policy and legal issues. The media report claims that the legal position is not clear, so this post is intended to help readers understand that position. The university’s spokesman is quoted as read more…
There were two significant developments last week for the privacy in the cloud: The European Commission endorsed the EU-US Privacy Shield, which will replace the earlier Safe Harbor scheme that had been found wanting by the European Court of Justice in the Schrems decision. The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in the US decided that read more…
The Office of the Information Commissioner (“OAIC”) has released a consultation draft Guide to big data and the Australian Privacy Principles (the “Guide”). The draft Guide has been released at a time when many Australian businesses are exploring the potential of Big Data analysis for their business, and are grappling for the first time with read more…
The Senate’s Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee (“Committee”), in an inquiry into the worldwide phenomenon known as ‘revenge porn’, made recommendations last week that acts of ‘revenge porn’ should be made a crime on Commonwealth and State levels. But ‘revenge porn’ scandals are only for the J-Laws and Kim Kardashians of the world right? Apparently not. read more…
The Administrative Appeals Tribunal has delivered Telstra, and many other companies who collect operational data about services they provide to individual end users, an early Christmas present by overturning a determination by the Privacy Commissioner from earlier this year and finding that mobile network data held by Telstra is not personal information about Telstra’s customers. read more…