Keeping it private
After four years, draft legislation to overhaul Australia's Privacy Act could ramp up class actions and increase scrutiny of companies' AI training efforts. And there's still more to come.
Plans to overhaul Australia’s privacy laws have just landed in a week that perfectly illustrates the overlapping issues facing policymakers.
First, there was the government’s announcement on Tuesday of plans to block kids’ access to social media. If introduced, the ban throws up enforcement challenges including that age verification of minors poses serious privacy issues.
On Wednesday, Meta global privacy policy director Melinda Claybaugh and the company’s vice president of APAC public policy Simon Milner faced questions from a Senate committee on artificial intelligence about why Meta doesn’t give Australian users the chance to opt out of training the company’s AI models. That option is, however, available to users in the EU because of more stringent requirements under General Data Protection Regulation that dictate any processing of personal data (including for training AI) is only lawful under specific circumstances.
Now, the Albanese government has announced long-awaited changes to privacy laws including measures to outlaw doxxing.
