Dominic is the CEO of Lawpath, dedicating his days to making legal easier, faster and more accessible to businesses. Dominic is a recognised thought-leader in Australian legal disruption, and was recognised as a winner of the Australian Legal Innovation Index and recently a winner of the LexisNexis 40 Under 40 (APAC).
💡Key Insight
- Mandatory privacy breach notification in Australia is expected to introduce a legal requirement for organisations to report serious data breaches to affected individuals and regulators, addressing gaps where businesses previously did not have to disclose breaches like large system hacks.
- New laws aim to increase transparency around privacy incidents and push businesses to improve data protection practices, creating stronger accountability for how personal information is handled.
- The reforms would complement the Notifiable Data Breaches (NDB) scheme by potentially expanding obligations for reporting data loss or misuse that could harm individuals.
- Businesses should prepare for inbound compliance requirements and assess their privacy policies and breach response plans accordingly.
Privacy is set to become a huge issue for Australian businesses as the government has introduced a bill into parliament requiring companies that have a data breach of some kind (eg. a hacking attack or a lost laptop) to notify the people whose data has been compromised (and possibly to notify the media).
Currently in Australia, companies are under no specific obligation to notify people if their data has been compromised. For example Sony Playstation had its systems hacked causing the exposure of the records of 77 Million users globally. There were over 1 Million users in Australia that were affected, however, there was no law which required Sony to tell the users their data had been breached. This will change under the new laws, expected to be passed by parliament in the next few months.
Combine mandatory breach notification and the recent changes to the law allowing the Privacy Commissioner to issue fines of up to $1.7 Million for breach of privacy and it looks like 2014 will be a big year for privacy compliance.
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