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Snapshot

  • The Privacy and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2024 is currently before the Australian Parliament.
  • Legal professionals advising private sector entities and Australian government agencies will need to be familiar with the potential impacts of the amendments in the Bill.
  • The Bill would strengthen several of the Australian Privacy Principles, introduce a new civil penalty regime for breaches, trigger creation of a Children’s Online Privacy Code, create a statutory tort of privacy and create a new criminal offence of doxxing.
  • Entities utilising automated decision making should be mindful of heightened transparency requirements in combination with new powers for the regulator.

The Privacy and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2024 (the ‘POLA Bill’) is currently before Parliament. It has been described by the government as the ‘first tranche’ in the long running project to reform the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) (the ‘Privacy Act’).

However, the most significant, impactful proposals to reform the Privacy Act – long flagged as its policy intent by the government and expected by industry – have all been left out of this Bill. It has been suggested they will be in a ‘second tranche’ Bill sometime after the next election.

Tranche 2 reform proposals – such as modernised definitions for personal information and consent, and the introduction of a ‘fair and reasonable’ test – will be needed to address systemic problems with toxic social media; intrusive data brokering; online tracking, profiling and targeting; as well as algorithms which push hate speech, misinformation and other harmful content online.

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