Front and Centre: Privacy makes Front-Page, without a breach!
By Cameron Abbott, Warwick Andersen, Rob Pulham and Max Evans
Privacy lawyers have been waiting for this day for years (some of us decades). Privacy is on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, despite there being no actual data breach. According to the article, Alinta Energy, one of the Australia’s biggest energy companies, is putting the privacy of its over 1.1 million retail gas and electricity customers at risk through poor privacy protections and a lack of proper oversight.
While this is an interesting piece of investigative journalism, what is really interesting is that privacy is now newsworthy even in the absence of a data breach. It has been a long time coming but it seems society now rates privacy as front page news. As our lawyers have already been pointing out in giving presentations this year – privacy has finally hit the big time!