Data Privacy in Australia

This essay discusses the roles and responsibilities of the government, business organizations, and individuals in maintaining data privacy in Australia. It explores the current data privacy issues, the legal framework, and the importance of protecting personal information.

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

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Introduction
Data privacy and data breach related issues are the common occurrence now in these days.
Every day an individual, organisations, or even the government sites reported complaint that
they are facing problems related to data breaches or leak of their personal or secret
information (Watts and Casanovas, 2018). People now understand that the information they
are sharing online or store online is never safe or secure. As every day a large number of
cybercrimes and cyber thefts happening, it is the responsibility of every one to play a role of
barrier between the cyber criminals and data storage centre whether it is government,
businesses, or individuals. They all have to play a crucial role to protect the personal
information to be disclosed in the public. This essay is based on the roles and responsibilities
of government, individuals, and business organisation in data privacy and how these three
parties can stop the data beach and data privacy issues in Australia. However, the essay also
includes the roles of business organisations and individuals in maintaining the data privacy.
What is Data Privacy?
Data privacy is related to relationship between collection of data and dissemination of data
and proper handling of data, which contain private and sensitive information about the
people, organisation, or even about the government and that needs to be safe and secure. Any
unauthorised access or dissemination of data called data breach, which is an illegal activity
and normally done by cyber criminals for their personal use of gain (Bennett and Raab,
2017).
Data Privacy in Australia
Australia does not have any general law regarding right to privacy in Australia. The
information rights in the Australia are protected by a combination of commonwealth, state,
and territory legislation. Each state and territory has their own a set of privacy principles,
which is based on the OECD principles. However, to protect the privacy of online users and
for the online data privacy, Australia uses Australian Privacy Principles (AAPs), which helps
to protect the user privacy rights and protect their data from any unethical access or
authorization. However, in Australia the key legislation applied to online privacy along with
the data privacy under the act of ‘Privacy Act 1988’ (Cth).

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People are sharing or storing large number of personal information and data on the online
apps or online data store such as cloud storage, Google drives etc. apart from this, every
organisation has their own data warehouse where they can store a huge amount of personal
data such as user’s online banking transactions, online purchasing records, bank details etc.
These information need to protection because these are sensitive data of users and breaching
of data may result in heavy loss in terms of both financially and mentally (Eckstein, et. al.,
2018).
Role and Responsibilities of Government in Data Privacy
Role of government is so important in managing and maintaining the data and its privacy.
The major reason behind this is the vast collection and storage of data in the data warehouse
of government. Government is responsible for storing and collecting a huge amount of data
related to its citizen’s personal financial transactions, their health records, personal
information like age, education, and even the details related to driver license etc. Government
of Australia is responsible for managing these data and ensure that no one use these data for
personal gain or benefits (Sivaraman, et. al., 2015). However, in Australia, every state plays
an important role in data privacy and security However, to ensure the safety and security of
these sensitive data, the government needs to implement a strict cybercrime laws in the
country and made it compulsory to adhere everyone. The best ways of managing these data
and protect the personal information of citizens, the Australia government should make a
strong technological security surroundings for its data warehouse where it keeps all the data
related to its people (Daly, 2018).
The other responsibility of Australian government is to implement a common legislation in
whole country, which is mandatory to follow everyone while using online information,
sharing personal data, or storing any sensitive data online. However, the privacy act 1988
includes thirteen Australian Principles, which is applied on both individual and organisations
(Swieca, Hamilton and Meaklim, 2017). The government needs to ensure that all the
principles are followed by people and adhere in proper manner, thus any data breach issue
will not be raised. The privacy Act of government protect the data related to credit reporting
system of people, income tax and other tax file numbers, and information related to health
and medical research. The government has responsibility to ensure that not a single data
leaked to any unauthorised person and every person will get their own personal information
with easy access facilities (He, Chan and Guizani, 2015).

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Roles and Responsibilities of Business organisations in Data Privacy
In the era of online business operations and Internet of things (IoT), every business
organisation has to deal with large number of user’s personal data and information. People
uses online mode for buying products and services in every country and pay the cost of the
product through online. Therefore, it is the responsibility of business organisation to protect
the user’s personal data and their transaction detail and bank detail history. As growing
number of people, every day shopping or buying products online and it leads to vast amount
of data generation for the business organisation with every increasing number of customers
and their activities. Managing such a large volume of data is really a tough for any business
organisation. However, it has been accepted by many researchers and analyst that companies
can gain a better insight into their customers and increase their efficiency by tapping into big
data. However, it is the responsibility of business organisation to protect the data of its
customers and avoid any unauthorised access or theft of data from any cyber-attacks
(Jackson, O'Donnell, and Cattlin, 2016).
The Australian business organisations is generally fail to provide the protection for the
customer data and the number of cases of cyber-attacks and data privacy issue increases with
every passing years. One of the great examples of irresponsible behaviour towards data
privacy was Facebook. Facebook has been criticized for many times when it was discovered
that Cambridge Analytica used more than 87 million of Facebook user’s personal information
for the personal benefit and tried to influence the result of USA election in 2016. Therefore,
the roles of organisations are really crucial factor in providing privacy to the user’s data and
avoid any data breach issue (Mehmood, et. al., 2016).
Roles and Responsibilities of Individual in Data Privacy
The individual’s roles in data privacy are so crucial in the country. The Australian Privacy
Principles (APP)-12 provides an authority to the individuals to access their own data and the
organisation must respond to the query of users (Perera, et. al., 2015). Apart from this, it is
essential for an individual to follow the government rules, laws, and safety measures to
maintain the data privacy. However, the responsibilities of individual are not limited to
access their own data rather people should also care when they access the data from other
sources. It is the responsibility of people to follow the cyber law and data privacy regulation
when they access or share any information on the internet (Cavoukian and Chibba, 2018).

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Apart from this, the individual should also ensure that they are not sharing their credential
such as id and passwords with other unknown person. An individual must care about the
sensitivity of data and protect the privacy of data while using the internet (Pow, et. al., 2017).
The Australian government needs to protect the privacy of data by a strong cyber laws and
stop those people who gain advantage of person data by selling them to another party and
gain personal benefits. It is the responsibility of individuals that do not share their personal
data such as bank details, social id passwords, taxation and income details, or any other such
type of personal details with other unknown person, which is sensitive in nature and may
result in heavy loss if data privacy is breached.
Conclusion
In conclusion, in order to maintain data privacy government, business organisations, and
individuals all have their own responsibilities and if these all follow the cyber law and adhere
the law related to data privacy in Australia, not a single data breach will be recorded. These
all should follow the ‘Australian Privacy Principles’ and ‘Privacy Act 1988’, while access or
using any data. However, the responsibility of Australian government is crucial, as they are
responsible to manage a huge amount of data about their citizens and different business
organisation. Apart from this, the government should also ensure that people in the country
follow the privacy laws and did not try any unauthorised access of data, which is sensitive
and leads to a major loss for people. The government should ensure that every individual
aware about the law and follow all the necessary guidelines and ethical rules while accessing
data from Internet.

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References
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