Privacy Advocates Oppose Aussie Data Breach Laws 25
schliz writes "This week, Australia's Attorney-General released a discussion paper about introducing laws that would force companies to notify members of the public any time personal information about that customer falls into the wrong hands. California introduced similar mandatory data breach notification laws in 2003, but Australian privacy advocates are now opposing the move, saying it's a decade too late."
Privacy != Security (Score:3, Insightful)
Since when has security and privacy even been the same things. The companies now, jizz data to anyone who'll pay for it. Even banks sell financial data these days, telecoms is a data selling field day. None of these things would be 'notified' as a data breach, since they're normal data selling business.
So not only is it a deflection, a way of heading off a decent privacy law, it would give people a false sense of privacy. They hadn't been notified their data had been lost because it hadn't been lost, it had been sold. It had been stripped of the name and sold in aggregate, it had been handed over to any random man in uniform on a random claim.
They've had a massive expansion of data requests, none of those would be notified, the only people who find out about those are if there is a trial and that data is used as evidence. Every bogus request is done in secret. What kind of notification law is that?
Re:Privacy != Security (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, imagine, getting a text "Your personal data, including SSN, address, phone number, and other collected data from your browser was sold by company X to company Y and Z". A few minutes later, you find out company Z made another deal with A through H and so on. And at the end of the day, you'd think, OMG these bastards made a fortune just from selling my data alone, and I still have to pay for their crappy services.