Media Release

Electronic Frontiers Australia Inc.

                                                     13th April 2000

                       Privacy Bill Flawed

The much-vaunted promise of the Information Economy will never be realised 
unless the government gets more serious about privacy issues, according 
to Internet watchdog Electronic Frontiers Australia.  EFA was commenting 
on the introduction of the Privacy Amendment (Private Sector) Bill 2000 
in Parliament yesterday.

"When Australians give their personal information to organizations, they 
have the quite reasonable expectation that their privacy will be respected,"
said EFA Executive Director Peter Upton in Canberra today.

"The Commonwealth Government's commitment to providing a legislative 
privacy protection regime for the private sector, as is already provided 
in the Commonwealth public sector, is therefore laudable and welcome," 
he said.

"But while the Bill introduced in Parliament by the Attorney-General is 
a step in the right direction, significant areas of concern remain.  The 
major problem is that the Bill appears to be riddled with exemptions, which 
in our view will seriously undermine the protection it offers."

"EFA believes that the Bill's general prohibitions against the secondary 
use of information which was originally provided for a primary unrelated 
purpose, are seriously compromised by the exemption of 'related
corporations'.  This creates an unfortunate loophole, capable of leading 
to quite unforeseen uses of and access to private information, 
given in trust, by such bodies."

Other exemptions such as those given to political parties during election 
periods, to the media, and to small businesses, also seem to severely 
compromise the level of protection afforded.

People giving their private information to others in the course of their 
daily lives need certainty about the uses to which that information will 
be put, and the law should therefore not provide these wide-ranging 
exemptions.

EFA will be closely examining the detail of this Bill, and seeking to 
convince the Parliament to provide world standard privacy protection for 
the people of Australia.

[ENDS]

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      Electronic Frontiers Australia Inc  --  http://www.efa.org.au/
      representing Internet users concerned with on-line freedoms
      Email: mail@efa.org.au  Phone: 02 9255 7969  Fax: 02 9255 7736
      URL of this release: http://www.efa.org.au/Publish/PR000413.html
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      Media Contact:

                 Peter Upton
                 Phone: 0428 624 970
                 peter@efa.org.au
      -------------------------------------------------------------- 

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