Consumers using online retail marketplaces such as eBay and Amazon “have little effective choice in the amount of data they share”, according to the latest report of the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) Digital Platform Services Inquiry. Consumers may benefit from personalisation and recommendations in these marketplaces based on their data, but many are… Read more »
Brisbane startup DataBench has appointed its first external CEO with founder David Christmas handing over the reins veteran tech exec Paul Muller. Muller has been an advisor to the automated data privacy platform’s board for the past nine months and has previously been a C-suite exec for the likes of VMWare, SAP, Oracle, Solnet and… Read more »
An Australian software developer has accused Australian border authorities of abusing their power to search his phone when returning home from a recent holiday. Taking to Reddit to share his experience with others, the traveller, James, says he has concerns that the Customs Act allows officers at the border to force people to hand over… Read more »
State, territory, and federal governments have agreed to the first national data sharing program that will ease the movement of data between jurisdictions. The formation of the Australian Data Network follows an intergovernmental data sharing agreement signed by the National Cabinet in early July which commits Australian state, territorial and federal governments to share data with one… Read more »
The proliferation of child sexual abuse material on the internet is harrowing and sobering. Technology companies send tens of millions of reports per year of these images to the nonprofit National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The way companies that provide cloud storage for your images usually detect child abuse material leaves you vulnerable… Read more »
Have you ever chatted with a friend about buying a certain item and been targeted with an ad for that same item the next day? If so, you may have wondered whether your smartphone was “listening” to you. But is it really? Well, it’s no coincidence the item you’d been interested in was the same… Read more »
Google and Google Australia misled consumers about its use of personal location data, according to Australia’s Federal Court in a landmark legal decision. Consumer watchdog the ACCC took Google to court in October 2019 over the use of location data collected through Android mobile devices between January 2017 and December 2018, in a world-first enforcement… Read more »
Most people these days are aware that what they share online is both valuable and vulnerable. Data privacy has become a major concern for consumers and corporations alike. The issue will come to a head when New Zealand’s Privacy Act 2020 comes into force on December 1. The legislation replaces and updates the 1993 act.… Read more »
Atlassian boss Mike Cannon-Brookes and Square Peg Capital’s Paul Bassat are among the tech sector’s high-profile supporters of the federal government’s contact-tracing smartphone app, CovidSafe, released on Sunday, but many remain wary of letting politicians anywhere near their data amid ongoing suspicion of their motives. Cannon-Brookes came out in favour of the app, which… Read more »
The Australian Information Commissioner has launched Federal Court legal action against Facebook, accusing the social media giant of “systemic failures to comply with Australian privacy laws” involving more than 311,000 Australian users as the fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal continues. The case alleges that between March 2014 to May 2015, Facebook disclosed the personal… Read more »
The growing power of Facebook, Google and other tech companies as they swallow smaller rivals has Australia’s competition watchdog, the ACCC, worried about the threat to consumer data and privacy. Speaking at the Consumer Policy Research Conference Conference in Melbourne today, Australian Consumer and Competition Commission chair Rod Sims said Google and Facebook “are essentially… Read more »
If you’ve just lodged your FY2019 tax return and left off income from renting out a room for a few nights on Airbnb, you’d better let the Australian Tax Office (ATO) you need to make some amendments quickly. The global online accommodation site has given the ATO the rental income data – and much more… Read more »
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