The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) has released its Annual Report for 2014–15 showing privacy complaints down despite consumer attentiveness to privacy increasing.
In 2014–15 the OAIC:
- handled 14,640 phone enquiries
- answered 3409 written enquiries
- finalised 1976 privacy complaints
- among other stats
They also received 117 data breach notifications of which 110 were voluntary and initiated four investigations.
Whilst the number of privacy complaints for the 2014-15 financial year did drop 33 percent it is almost 90 percent up from two years ago. The general awareness of privacy has risen since the amended Privacy Act came into effect on March 14, 2014. We at Shred-X expect to this rise even more when the government discusses Data Breach Notificationlater in the year.
In preparation, businesses can review the Office of Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC)’s Data Breach Notification Guide. We also recommend reviewing the OAIC’s Guide to Securing Personal Information. The Guide includes steps and strategies to minimise the risk of a ‘trusted insider’ breach, and to emphasise the necessity of designing and building-in security measures that factor in human error. The 5th step involves ‘destroying or de-identify the personal information when it is no longer needed’.
For over 15 years Shred-X Document Destruction has been the leader in secure destruction services. We assist organisations in complying with the Privacy Act 1988 and its Amendments providing tailored services to thousands of commercial sites and households across Australia.
Shred-X is very proud to be the ONLY Australian document destruction company witheight (8) NAID AAA certified sites across Australia:
- Adelaide
- Brisbane
- Canberra
- Hobart
- Melbourne
- Perth
- Sydney
- Townsville
Our secure destruction services include paper shredding, digital media destruction (hard drives, CDs, credit cards), archive box cleanouts and uniform destruction to name a few.