The Australian Information Commissioner this week called for a ban on police accessing QR code check-in data, unless for COVID-19 contact tracing purposes. State police have already accessed this data on at least six occasions for unrelated criminal investigations. We need cooperation and clarity regarding how COVID surveillance data is handled, to protect people’s privacy and maintain public trust in surveillance measures. We propose more detailed and consistent laws to be enacted throughout Australia, covering all COVID surveillance.

A coalition of the country’s leading consumer organisations is calling on Australia’s major banks to make significant updates to their industry code to improve outcomes for customers. The Consumers’ Federation of Australia’s (CFA) submission of behalf of the coalition to the 2021 review of the Australian Banking Association (ABA) Banking Code of Practice (the Code) sets out over 100 recommendations.

“If political leaders take comfort now in sharing platforms with police and military commanders to enhance their own authority, and feel there is some political benefit in doing so, they’ll be tempted to do it again in the future, and it becomes a part of the normal fabric of politics, which it shouldn’t.”

I spent last week studying the 26,000 words of privacy terms published by eBay and Amazon, trying to extract some straight answers, and comparing them to the privacy terms of other online marketplaces such as Kogan and Catch. The bad news is that none of the privacy terms analysed are good. Based on their published policies, there is no major online marketplace operating in Australia that sets a commendable standard for respecting consumers’ data privacy.

The APF has been buried in a large number of issues, and was unable to prioritise work on the Census during 2020-21. APF invested vast amounts of time in the lead-up to each of the ’06, ’11 and ’16 events. The impact we had was considerable in ’06, but has declined each time since. The simple fact is that the ABS has long since abandoned its once exemplary stand on privacy. It has now positioned itself as the operator of a centralised database on the whole population, expropriating data from many government agencies, retaining all Census and Survey data in identified form, and consolidating it all into a single, dense record. The National Health Survey has been incorporated into the 2021 Census for randomly selected households.

Facebook recently announced significant changes to Instagram for users aged under 16. New accounts will be private by default, and advertisers will be limited in how they can reach young people.
The new changes are long overdue and welcome. But Facebook’s commitment to childrens’ safety is still in question as it continues to develop a separate version of Instagram for kids aged under 13.