VIDEO: Stories from down under

SYNOPSIS AND KEY POINT
Malcolm Crompton, former Privacy Commissioner of Australia, follows up an “egregious” story of data mis-use with two uplifting stories of things going right in the fight against Covid-19. In the first case, an automated fraud detection system was based on defective computer programmes which led to threatening debt collection techniques which amounted to ‘guilty until proved innocent’. This led to a “massive political debacle” when the system was eventually ruled to be illegal. By contrast, “the strongest piece of privacy law ever passed anywhere in the world” is protecting information collected by a contact-tracing app. And the QR Code used to control access to premises has been engineered with a “Privacy by Design” approach backed up by a full Privacy Impact Assessment

BIO
Malcolm Crompton AM is Founder and Lead Privacy Advisor at Information Integrity Solutions Pty Ltd (IIS), a consultancy specialising in data protection and privacy strategies 

Malcolm was Australia’s Privacy Commissioner from 1999 to 2004 and led the implementation of the nation’s first broad based private sector privacy law.  

Malcolm was founding President of the International Association of Privacy Professionals Australia New Zealand in 2008 and director until 2016.
 
He has been a member of advisory bodies around the world since 2003, including the European Union, OECD and APEC as well as large global companies. He is a member of the New South Wales Information and Privacy Advisory Committee.

He was made a Member of the Order of Australia in the 2016 Queen’s Birthday Honours for significant service to public administration, particularly to data protection, privacy, and identity management, and to the community.  

Malcolm is a co-author of The New Governance of Data and Privacy: Moving from compliance to performance, Australian Institute of Company Directors, November 2018.