Carmakers including Kia, Subaru, Mitsubishi and General Motors are providing details of owners’ driving behaviour to insurance companies, leading many drivers to report surges in car insurance premiums despite industry claims that the transmitted data (‘telematics’) helps good drivers pay less. The revelations have stoked a PR firestorm after the New York Times related the experiences of… Read more »
Microsoft has been its own worst enemy this week as the tech giant suffered two unrelated data leak incidents where masses of internal documents, trade secrets, and backups of employee computers were released on the internet. On Tuesday, researchers at security company Wiz went public about a 38TB trove of data that Microsoft’s AI team had accidentally… Read more »
Back in 2017, The Economist published a headline that became a meme. It said data had become the new oil. By that it meant that the world’s biggest and most profitable companies no longer worked with oil, as they had throughout the 20th century, but with data. By 2022, three of the world’s five most… 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 »
What if your insurer was tracking your online data to price your car insurance? Seems far-fetched, right? Yet there is predictive value in the digital traces we leave online. And insurers may use data collection and analytics tools to find our data and use it to price insurance services. For instance, some studies have found… 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 »
OnePassport knows that when people trust you with their personal information, data security matters more than anything. COVID resulted in many headaches, but one less talked about is the avalanche of administration brought down on small business. The paperwork and monitoring involved in ensuring the ever-changing compliance of your workforce can bury even the most… 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 »
A data sharing startup DataCo Technologies has emerged out of ANZ Bank’s VC and innovation arm, 1835i, to help businesses organisations safely test and realise the value of collaborating on data. The DataCo Collaboration Platform allows organisations to connect and collaborate on customer data, leveraging the latest privacy enhancing and data protection technologies to remove… 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 »
If you’ve seen photos of a teapot shaped like an avocado or read a well-written article that veers off on slightly weird tangents, you may have been exposed to a new trend in artificial intelligence (AI). Machine learning systems called DALL-E, GPT and PaLM are making a splash with their incredible ability to generate creative… Read more »
Artificial intelligence (AI) systems must be systemically retrained to eliminate gender bias, industry analysts have advised amidst warnings that male-dominated development teams must be re-educated to build robotic automation systems that better reflect society. Those workers – which have rapidly become commonplace in everything from logistics centres to police forces and automotive manufacturing plants – have been programmed for a range… Read more »
With petrol prices rising, are you filling up on the best day of the week? Are you subscribing to too many streaming services? And how much are you actually spending on home delivery? An emerging breed of AI-driven fintechs can tell you all of this and more – simply by looking at your account and… Read more »
Legislation is never the fastest moving part of the technology sector, but when it does catch up, the industry should rethink the practices that have been addressed by a new law. One such example is screen scraping, a data collection practice that has been banned overseas and needs to be banned in Australia for its… Read more »
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