Privacy bodies must co-ordinate, says ACCAN

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 14 September 2010 09:07

IT Policy - Regulation

The Australian Communications Consumers Action Network (ACCAN) has called for tighter co-ordination between organisations responsible for dealing with consumers' privacy complaints, after finding a huge disparity in their performance levels.

An ACCAN-funded study into communications-related privacy complaints has found there are vast differences in complaint resolution times, remedies and compensation available to consumers, depending on which of the three statutory bodies they lodge a complaint with.

The report - compiled by the Cyberspace Law & Policy Centre at UNSW and funded by a grant from ACCAN - says that Australians made 21,000 communications sector-related privacy complaints last year, ranging from issues with spam emails, social networking sites and telemarketing calls through to the misuse of silent telephone numbers and life-threatening calls.

There are three bodies consumers can lodge a privacy complaint with: the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), which received around 16,000 complaints last year; the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO), which received 5,000 complaints; and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner (OPC), which received just 110 complaints.

According to the report, the ACMA on average will resolve a privacy complaint in just five days and the TIO ten days while the OPC - despite the relatively tiny number of complaints it receives - takes an average of 180 days.

The report also says that the OPC, in contrast to other regulators, has never named a telecommunications organisation that has breached privacy and has made no formal determinations against any private sector organisation since 2005.

"The complete absence of any high profile or high impact enforcement action by the OPC means that business organisations are under no pressure to comply with privacy laws, or to respond to complaints quickly," said Chris Connolly from the Cyberspace Law & Policy Centre.

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