Frequent Data Breaches and Emerging Privacy Concerns

Running head: FREQUENT DATA BREACHES AND EMERGING PRIVACY CONCERNS
FREQUENT DATA BREACHES AND EMERGING PRIVACY CONCERNS
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1FREQUENT DATA BREACHES AND EMERGING PRIVACY CONCERNS
A data breach occurs when there is release of secured private and confidential
information in an unreliable environment intentionally or unintentionally. Several businesses and
government organization operate on the basis of personal data of the citizens which must be
secured from invalid access of data from strange sources. Privacy of the citizens must be one of
the fundamental denominator in determining the operation of any business or government
agency. However, the recent spate of data breaches including Facebook data breach, PageUp
People breach and data breach at Equifax and so on in diverse sectors has garnered widespread
attention from all avenues in the newspapers (Koehn, 2018). Reports suggests that according to
the Privacy Commissioner, there were 63 breaches reported in the first six weeks – more than 10
breaches a week. This calls for a common law and regulatory framework to ensure that the
privacy of the citizens is the foremost priority in the operations of the business worldwide.
European regulators brought in a landmark legislation General Data Protection Regulation
(GDPR) which was still long overdue in Australia and many other countries.
On the other hand Australia brought Privacy Amendment (Notifiable Data Breaches) Act
2017 which has been passed to establish Notifiable Data Breaches (NDB) scheme which aims to
notify the individuals where the personal data has the likelihood of the data breach. This
notification must be supplemented responsive action that must be taken by the individuals in case
of data breach ("Notifiable Data Breaches scheme| Office of the Australian Information
Commissioner - OAIC", 2018). This is a remarkable step in the backdrop of upsurge in frequent
personal as well as financial data breaches. Data breaches has a hefty cost which the company
has to bear as witnessed in data breach at Equifax amounts to a cost of US$430 million. A survey
by HP Australia IT Security Study highlights that 46% of small-to-medium sized businesses
(SMBs) said that most of their customers are refraining from data collection and sharing ("Aus