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Social media websites could find themselves in court if they breachAustralia s Privacy Act now that the Privacy Commissioner has beengranted new powers to take breaches to court. The new powers allows the Privacy Commissioner to be able to acceptundertakings from companies which can be enforced in court; make adetermination in own motion investigations, where a complaint hasnot been lodged by an individual but the Office of the AustralianInformation Commission (OAIC) has received third-party informationof breaches; seek civil penalties for serious or repeated breaches;and carry out performance assessments on private sectororganisations. Timothy Pilgrim, Privacy Commissioner at the OAIC, told Computerworld Australia that social media websites, like other organisations, need to haveappropriate protections in place to protect users personalinformation. He said the new powers coincide with an obligation fororganisations to be much clearer about how they are collectinginformation and what they are going to do about it. According to Pilgrim, If they fail to meet that, then we would belooking to work with the organisation to fix those policies andagain, we could look at getting written undertakings from them todo that and failure to comply with those could result in us takingaction through the courts. However, he said users of social media websites also have to ensurethey adequately protect themselves. Often when we re dealing with social media sites we do find thatindividuals don t necessarily have the strongest privacy settingsin place, Pilgrim said. He said while the new power to take organisations to court forcivil penalties may be a deterrent for companies breaching thePrivacy Act, it will be a last resort action and would only bepursued when organisations had failed to improve their systemsafter being alerted of a breach. My approach will be first of all, as we do currently, try andwork with organisations to come to an agreed set of undertakings,which happens in a number of cases to resolve the issue, Pilgrimsaid. What I think will occur is that we will see a stronger messagebeing sent to both Australian government agencies and privatesector organisations about the importance of ensuring that theyhave good processes in place before something goes wrong, becausethese new powers will give us new remedies to enforce the laws ifsomething does go wrong. I would certainly hope that if we identify that an organisationwas in breach of the Act, they would immediately take steps toremedy it because at the end of the day, it will not be a very goodpublic relations exercise for an organisation not to comply withthe Privacy Act. Pilgrim said it would depend on the type of breach as to how longorganisations would have to fix their systems if they are found tobe in breach of the Privacy Act. We would have to look at the size of the systems rebuild that mayneed to occur, and we would take that into account, obviously whilewe re working with the organisation. It could be something that iseasily fixed through to something that may require quite a largewholesale systems rebuild, he said. The new powers are part of the government s reforms into the Privacy Act 1988 , which will be introduced in the winter sitting of parliament. The OAIC also recently announced updates to data breach notification , in conjunction with Privacy Awareness Week 2012. Follow Stephanie McDonald on Twitter: @stephmcdonald0 Follow Computerworld Australia on Twitter: @ComputerworldAU ComputerworldAU @ComputerworldAU Twitter: @ComputerworldAU]]. The e-commerce company in China offers quality products such as Vehicle Surveillance Camera Manufacturer , Automobile Rear View Camera, and more. For more , please visit 3G Mobile DVR today!
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