Data Privacy In Australia

Running Head: Data Privacy
Data Privacy In Australia
Essay
System04104
6/2/2019

Data Privacy
1
Introduction
Data privacy is a major concern in the world. Data privacy provides security to the
personal information of people. However, the concept of data privacy is increasing every day
with increasing use of online resource and information sharing. In the modern days, where
people kept their bank account details on online digital mobile apps, uses internet for online
transactions, and save the personal information on the online app or sharing it from one
person to another person via internet. The increasing use of online transactions of sensitive
and secret information needs more security from government and from the companies
involved in this type of services (Mehmood, Natgunanathan, Xiang, Hua, & Guo, 2016). This
essay is based on such type of privacy issues and role of Australian government in the data
privacy. These data privacy approaches of the government not only protect the individual
data privacy issues, rather also protect the data privacy issue of small and large business
organisations in the country.
What is Data Privacy?
Data privacy refers to ways of handling data, information, or piece of data based on
its relevance or importance. For instance, when a people share his bank accounts details
through internet to another person or party, the interference or theft of his bank account
details by other illegal or unauthorised person, is an example of data privacy
Data Privacy in Australia
Australian government regulated the data privacy issues in Australia by federal, state
and territory laws. The Australian government applies the Federal privacy Act 1998 (Cth)
(Privacy Act) and its Australian privacy principles on small and large business organisations.
Data privacy in Australia is a major concern from last few years as more and more cases
arises every year related to cybercrime and data privacy issues. of However, the General Data
Protection Regulations (GDPR) is the Australian data privacy regulations is responsible for
managing data privacy in Australia and considers some the major issues related to Cyber
securities circles today (Cavoukian & Chibba, 2018).

Data Privacy
2
Roles and Responsibilities of Government, Individuals, and business
in Data Privacy
The roles and responsibilities of government in the data privacy are a crucial thing in
the data privacy and cyber security in the country. Apart from this, responsibilities of
individuals and business organisation are also important in the data privacy issues and
provide protection from the threats of cyber-attack (He, Chan & Guizani, 2015). The roles of
all these three factors have been discussed in separate paragraphs:
Roles and Responsibilities of Government in Data Privacy
The Australian government holds a huge amount of data of its citizens and other
business organisation in their data bank. This information includes bank account numbers,
transactions details, driver’s license information, social security numbers, taxation, and other
financial information. The major responsibility of the Australian government is to protect the
data from cyber criminals and ensure the security of data they hold. The Australian
government is responsible for formulating a statewide comprehensive approach to security
and security oversight (Carter & Hartridge, 2018). The government should also ensure that
the cyber law of the government is followed by every state and every business organisation in
order to keep the personal data safe and secure. However, the Australian government
formulated many cyber laws in last few years to avoid any cyber threats and attacks.
However, the increasing risk of cyber-attacks on the government sites and data storage is also
increasing, the government needs to improve its cyber security at the highest levels (Daly,
2018).
The Australian privacy laws are influenced by a variety of commonwealth, state, and
territory acts. ‘The privacy act’ are the data protection laws which is responsible to monitor
and regulate the collection of data and provide disclosure of personal information about
individuals, but this act is not responsible for protect the privacy of the individual in a
broader sense (Eckstein, Chalmers, Critchley, Jeanneret, McWhirter, Nielsen, & Nicol,
2018). However, the federal and state government both are responsible to provide security to
the users about their personal data and information. The major responsibility of Australian
federal and state government is to protect the right of people and properly implement the
code of conduct related to Australian Privacy Principles (APPs). It is also the responsibility
of government to establish a standard for collecting and handling the personal information
and ensure that all commonwealth agencies fulfil the same responsibilities. The APPs act in