[LINK] .nsw.gov.au and privacy

[Scott Howard]

On Tue, Mar 3, 2020 at 5:22 PM David <dlochrin at aussiebb.com.au> wrote:

> I have no desire for an account with Salesforce.com, which is a "customer
> relations manager" and marketing company apparently based in San Franscisco.
>

You likely have dozens of "accounts" with Salesforce, but calling it a CRM
system is a bit like calling the Sydney Opera House a Karaoke club.

Salesforce is the largest software-as-a-service in the world, and is used
by thousands of companies - for some CRM activities as you've stated, but
for many others as a development platform for other customer-based service
systems - like Service NSW - and so much more. You likely interact with
Salesforce (or SFDC as it's often called - Salesforce Dot Com) dozens of
times a week without actually knowing it.

So much for privacy, it's pretty clear all residents personal information
> id held offshore.


What proof do you have of this?  Salesforce has datacenters (physical,
co-located, and/or cloud-based) in countries all around the world -
including Australia.  I don't know that Service NSW is using one in
Australia, but I would strongly suspect they are.


> Why is there no mandatory requirement for all personal information to be
> held solely in Australia and under the direct control of Government?
>

Depends what you mean by "Direct Control', but if you are ruling out cloud
service providers of various forms (such as Salesforce), then I damn well
hope not.  Such a rule would put Australian Government IT back into the
last century.

Yes, there should absolutely be controls in place (and there are) - but
that's different to simply saying "no cloud providers".

  Scott