Facebook acknowledged in a Senate inquiry yesterday that it is scraping the public photos of Australian users to train its artificial intelligence (AI) models. Facebook’s parent company Meta claims this excludes data from users who have marked their posts as “private”, as well as photos or data from users under the age of 18. Since… Read more »
Despite being drafted and tabled in the Australian Senate in 2022, the Action Initiation Bill was only passed last week. Action initiation would transform the Consumer Data Right (CDR) from merely a data-sharing framework into a dynamic system that empowers consumers to take action based on the insights they gain. The CDR was created to… Read more »
On Tuesday, Australia’s minister for government services, Bill Shorten, announced the federal government is developing a new digital identity and credential system. Known as the Trust Exchange (TEx), Shorten said the new system will be “world leading” and represents an “exciting step forward for Australia’s digital infrastructure”. But details about the system are scarce. Shorten… Read more »
Australia’s communications watchdog has imposed new rules on Telstra after the telecommunications giant was found to have leaked the details of more than 140,000 people who requested their phone numbers not be shared publicly. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) said it had issued Telstra with “a remedial direction” following an investigation of the… Read more »
Photos of Australian children have been used without consent to train artificial intelligence (AI) models that generate images. A new report from the non-governmental organisation Human Rights Watch has found the personal information, including photos, of Australian children in a large data set called LAION-5B. This data set was created by accessing content from the… Read more »
Two subsidiaries of social media giant Meta, Facebook Israel and Onavo Inc, have been fined $10 million each for misleading conduct, in breach of the Australian Consumer Law, over a virtual private network (VPN) service that was used to gather data on users and share it with Facebook’s marketing team. Consumer watchdog the ACCC launched… Read more »
The landmark three-year review of Australia’s Privacy Act has recommended significant new rights be handed to individuals, including to sue over privacy breaches, have their data erased and to opt out of targeted marketing. A widespread review of the Privacy Act was launched in 2020 by the former Coalition government on the back of a… Read more »
ChatGPT has taken the world by storm. Within two months of its release, it reached 100 million active users, making it the fastest-growing consumer application ever launched. Users are attracted to the tool’s advanced capabilities – and concerned by its potential to cause disruption in various sectors. A much less discussed implication is the privacy… Read more »
Legal action by the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission against Google over changes to its data privacy policy has been dismissed by the Federal Court in a big win for the US tech company. The court found that Google did not mislead Australian consumers when it changed its privacy policy to expand the scope of… Read more »
By now, most of us are aware social media companies collect vast amounts of our information. By doing this, they can target us with ads and monetise our attention. The latest chapter in the data-privacy debate concerns one of the world’s most popular apps among young people – TikTok. Yet anecdotally it seems the potential… Read more »
When English statesman Sir Francis Bacon famously said “knowledge is power”, he could hardly have foreseen the rise of ubiquitous social media some 500 years later. Yet social media platforms are some of the world’s most powerful businesses – not least because they can collect massive amounts of user data, and use algorithms to turn… Read more »
Well-known Australian retailers are using facial recognition technology to identify customers who enter selected stores, an investigation by consumer advocacy group CHOICE has found. Hardware giant Bunnings, Kmart and The Good Guys are capturing facial recognition data. CHOICE asked 25 Australian retailers whether they use facial recognition technology, and analysed their privacy policies. Those three… Read more »
Schools’ use of educational technologies (edtech) grew exponentially at the height of COVID lockdowns. A recent Human Rights Watch (HRW) report has exposed children’s rights violations by providers of edtech endorsed by governments in Australia and overseas. The lockdowns have ended but edtech remains embedded in education. Children will have to navigate issues of data… Read more »
Google collects more personal data about its users than any other big tech company, an analysis has found just days after Facebook petitioned the ACCC for an exemption from regulation because Apple’s privacy crackdown is costing it money and market share. A deep analysis of the voluminous privacy policies of Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and Google by… Read more »
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 »
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