In 2016, the Australian government released, for research purposes, an extract of public health insurance data, comprising the 30-year billing history of ten percent of the population, with medical providers and patients purportedly de-identified. Melb…
Archives for 2017
Better than Santa, your IoT device will know who’s naughty and nice
Best to peek carefully into your Christmas stocking this year, for Santa may have brought you more surveillance and security risks than you bargained for. With the booming market for voice-controlled virtual personal assistant devices like Google’s Hom…
Preventing and responding to data breaches: are you ready for 2018?
“We take your privacy seriously.” Not since the advent of electronic banking finally rendered obsolete the laughable phrase “your cheque is in the mail” has there been a phrase which is more likely to induce me to – depending on my mood – engage in exa…
Looking forward, looking back: privacy challenges past and future
I tend to focus on privacy disasters in this blog (link here to: oh, pretty much every other blog I’ve ever written), but sometimes it is nice to pause and reflect on the privacy successes too. I’ve had particular reason to do so recently. Firstly, as…
Why the marriage equality poll is a privacy issue
What is it about August 9th? Last year it was that evening of national beating-your-head-against-your-laptop as the Census website went down, and stayed down. This year, the government decided the mark the anniversary of #censusfail by handing the ar…
What technology designers need to know to understand privacy
Privacy is contentious today. Some say the information age has brought real changes to privacy norms. With so much private data leaking through breaches, accidents and digital business practices, it’s often said that ‘the genie is out of the bottle’….
Balancing the ledger: accounting for the year in privacy
This Friday it will be the end-of-financial-year here in Australia, which means it’s time for a stock-take: see where we are at, count the positives and negatives, and determine our net position. Are we in the red or the black? So today, rather than r…
The privacy paradox: We want to have our data and eat it too
Much of the work we do here at Salinger Privacy involves Privacy Impact Assessment of new projects. One of the things I love about PIAs is that they’re not just about ticking off legal compliance – they need to consider community or stakeholder expect…
GDPR & PbD: what Aussies need to know about new privacy laws
Unless you’ve been living under a rock recently, you have probably at least heard about this new big thing in the privacy world called ‘GDPR’ … and maybe you have even wondered whether it matters to you. But once you realised it is a new European priv…
Just because you can disclose, doesn’t mean you should
Let’s talk about discretion and trust. And perhaps also the public interest. These are not the usual words I would use when introducing a discussion of the Disclosure principles in privacy law, but right now they seem apt. Because right now I am hopp…
Hashing, Beyonce & rainbows: a lay person’s guide to de-identification
Are you embarrassed to admit that you don’t know your statistical linkage keys from your house keys? Think ‘hashing’ is something you do to potatoes, and ‘adding salt’ is something you do to hot chips? Imagine ‘rainbow tables’ have something to do wi…
Mobiles, metadata and the meaning of ‘personal information’
The Federal Court has today determined not to resolve the great privacy question leftover like a bad hangover from 2013: When is information ‘about’ Ben, and when is it ‘about’ a device or a network? While at first glance you might think that the Priva…
