[LINK] google misdeeds and Australia's Privacy Commissioner

[Stephen Wilson]

Craig Sanders wrote:
>> What I've been trying to counter in  
>> this debate is a set of misconceptions about "public" information not 
>> being subject to privacy law.                                         
>>     
> nobody's ever said that it wasn't.  that's just another one of your stupid
> straw-men arguments
>   
Actually many people have made the claim that Google collecting data 
from the public domain are doing no wrong because the data is "public".  
The comments on this SMH story are full of that misconception: 
http://bit.ly/cibS5K.
And Craig, on 18/5/2010 you said "google collected publicly available 
data that people were broadcasting
for anyone to see. so what? big deal".  Do you believe that being 
"publicly available" makes privacy regulations irrelevant? 
> so if i walk into your office (or just walk past your office door or
> window) and yell out my name, address, phone number, bank account
> details, tax file number and so on you are guilty of storing PII, just
> because you overheard it and your brain automatically remembers things
> that it hears?
One more time ... the Privacy Act is very explicit about what collecting 
means.  Listening and remembering are not "collections".  Capturing data 
and recording it to a hard drive is.  Further, the Privacy Act doesn't 
apply to individuals but it does to corporations. 

So for me, one of the morals of the story -- reinforced over and over 
and over by Craig's evident difficulty engaging with the actual 
regulations -- is that technologists need to be aware of what the 
Privacy Act says, and how the operations of their technologies can be 
interpreted under that act.

Cheers,

Steve Wilson
Lockstep.