Australian Privacy Act Law Changes 2014

Australian Privacy Act / law changes in March 2014 mean a host of protections for Australian consumers. It will also mean businesses should be ready for these changes around how personal data is collected and used for email marketing, digital marketing and the like. The biggest change? Companies can be fined up to 1.7 million dollars per infringement of the act.

Over the past decade, any cyber, digital or internet-related laws have been playing catchup to what is happening in the consumer landscape. The ability for organisations to capture and use customers’ details is becoming a huge part of successful marketing strategies. The capabilities of EDM, eStores and CRM platforms once in place to data-mine and promote to segments of large consumer databases is now literally keystrokes away.

Australian Privacy Act Law Changes 2014
So what has changed?

From 14^th March 2014 the Australia Privacy Act, requires Mandatory Reporting of Cyber Breaches. This means that anyone who stores information, if they lose that information in any way – a laptop gets stolen with customer data on it, an employee takes home the customer database, your software or hardware is hacked and this information taken, the information is sold off to a 3rd party – all examples of when Mandatory reporting is required.

When the Australian government conducted a survey of 250 small to medium businesses, they found 1 in 5 had experienced some form of cyber attack in the last 12 months!

In general most companies don’t want their data taken or misused, as the IP and value to the company is considerable. However we get contacted every week by someone trying to sell us a list (we’ll we did until this week, lets see what happens in the next few months).  An example email follows this article; Where do these lists come from? Companies going broke, selling them, stealing them and cyber hackers / scammers.

We recommend you review your end-to-end handling of privacy data, how secure is it, is the data encrypted where ever it is stored? Who has access to it, is your team under confidentiality clauses with your company specific to private data ? How is the data monitored? etc etc? If you want help with this process or assistance reviewing your personnel and software tools, let us know. Happy to take calls on this anytime to assist in further improving the digital landscape for consumers. Our software and processes here have been through many rounds of tightening, both for ourselves and clients. We are a huge supporter of consumer privacy and anti-spaming and even over-spamming.

For that extra bit of safety, especially while transitioning, contact your insurance broker and ask for a Cyber specific Policy that handles the Australian Privacy act. &Mine recommends contacting Nathan Ray at Austbrokers – 03 9835 1345 – and have a quick chat about how to cost effectively insure cyber risks. Nathan helps companies like ours secure cyber risk with a base Cyber & Privacy Protection Plan covering;  Cyber Liability, Privacy Breach Costs, Hacker Damage, Cyber Extortion and Business Interruption.

Why this has’t come soon enough – Example Scam / Hacked Email Database Email we get all the time offering ‘lists’ to SPAM to…