Displaying items by tag: Angelene Falk

The Australian Government is restoring the separate role of Privacy Commissioner, five years after it was folded into the responsibilities of the Australian Information Commissioner.

The Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) has called on the Albanese Government to release an exposure draft of proposed changes to the Privacy Act before the end of the year, in the wake of recent high-profile data breaches of personal information.

The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) has released the latest Notifiable Data Breaches Report, covering July to December 2021. The report shows 464 data breach notifications, up 6%, with almost one in five being due to somebody emailing the wrong person.

American facial recognition company Clearview AI has breached the privacy of Australians by scraping biometric information from the Internet and releasing it through a facial recognition tool, the information commissioner Angelene Falk says.

OAIC: The convenience store group interfered with customers' privacy by collecting sensitive biometric information that was without necessity or reasonable consent.

GUEST OPINION by Steve Singer, Regional Vice President - Australia and New Zealand, Zscaler::It’s been a torrid year for cybersecurity infections, and the targets have been indiscriminate. It’s time we faced up to some ‘home truths’ about the situation,

The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner was notified of 539 data breaches during the July-December 2020 period, an increase of 5% on the figure of 512 reported during the previous three months.

Retail travel agency Flight Centre has been found to have interfered with the privacy of about 7000 of its customers by disclosing their personal information to third parties, without asking for consent.

The number of data breaches reported to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner in the first half of the year has fallen slightly but there has been a rise in ransomware attacks and impersonation attempts.

The Australian Information Commissioner has been given the green light by the Federal Court to sue Facebook Inc (the US company) and Facebook Ireland for allegedly violating the privacy of Australians in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Personal information of Facebook users in Australia was disclosed to the This Is Your Digital Life app for a different purpose to that which it was collected, a breach of the Privacy Act 1988, the Australian Information Commissioner has alleged in a case filed against the social media giant in the Australian Federal Court.

Five hundred and thirty-seven data breaches were reported to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner during the six months from July to December 2019, an increase of 19% over the previous six-month period, with malicious or criminal attacks - including cyber incidents - accounting for nearly two-thirds (64%) of the total.

The number of data breaches — 215 — reported to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner for the March quarter was lower than any of the previous three quarters, but one breach resulted in more than 10 million individuals being affected, leading to speculation that this could have been the Marriott breach which was first reported in December last year.

Health services providers continue to top the industry sectors reporting breaches under the Notifiable Data Breaches act.

In what has become merely a quarterly recital of statistics, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner says it was informed of 245 data breaches affecting personal information from July to September. This is three more than the previous quarter.

The way in which the decision by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner to launch a probe into the leakage of personal information of Australians by Facebook is being reported is laughable.