Region: Australia

The importance of marching in lockstep to develop harmonised standards for AI continues to be on the lips of every politician in front of a microphone, while at home governments are busy doing whatever they think best – the UK with its new safety evaluation process, the US with yet another boldly bipartisan proposal, and Japan with a new proposal for some guidelines. Meanwhile, yet another global tech giant has deployed a large language model.

11 September 2023

Ten data protection authorities have warned social media network operators of the need to comply with data scraping rules.

24 August 2023

The flood of public statements by tech companies seeking to preserve as much freedom as possible without setting themselves wholly at odds with governments over regulation continues, as those authorities cast around for views on just what regulation would even look like. The money, as always, speaks louder, and the biggest global companies are turning their attention to what AI could mean for their bottom line.

07 August 2023

A court has ordered Meta to pay a A$20 million (€12.2 million) fine after the company agreed that two of its subsidiaries violated Australian consumer law.

27 July 2023

Australia’s consumer watchdog has designated the data broker industry as the next target of its digital platform services inquiry, and invited information about its business practices to uncover possible competition and consumer issues in the sector.

11 July 2023

An Australian court has found that Clearview AI breached privacy law despite having no presence in the country, in a ruling that clarified Australian privacy law’s territorial scope and its application to companies that scrape huge amounts of public personal data.

10 May 2023

The Australian government will appoint a standalone privacy commissioner, reinstating the data regulator’s three-commissioner model amid growing security threats.

04 May 2023

Australia's data regulator has told a law firm that it will not investigate a representative complaint, causing confusion about its duties under national privacy rules.

18 April 2023

Australia’s privacy regulator has launched an investigation into Latitude Financial over a breach that exposed over 14 million records, prompting a team of law firms to look at potential legal action.

29 March 2023

The European Commission is hoping to close a clutch of new data-heavy trade deals in 2023, but some lawmakers are concerned about compromises to citizens’ privacy rights.

21 March 2023