Australia: Maximum fines for data breaches to increase more than tenfold

In Australia, penalties for “repeated and serious” privacy breaches are to be significantly increased. Attorney General Mark Dreyfuss made the announcement over the weekend. Instead of the maximum fine of 2.2 million Australian dollars (1.43 million euros), future damages of up to 50 million Australian dollars (32.2 million euros), three times the benefit of misuse of the data or 30% of the company’s adjusted sales during the affected period – whichever is greater. AP noted that the minister said corporations could face hundreds of millions of dollars in fines.

Response to data leaks

with Australia’s new government reacts to the plan The past few weeks have seen a series of sometimes serious data leaks. They would have shown that existing safeguards were inadequate, Dreyfuss writes. Penalties for such data leaks are seen not only as a result of business acumen. Businesses must realize the financial consequences and businesses must be pushed to protect Australians’ data. Also, recent incidents have raised concerns in the government that the economy is storing more user data for longer periods of time in hopes of eventually monetizing it. The legislation is expected to come out later this year AP writes.

It was only a few weeks ago that it became known that the personal data of over 10 million customers of the Australian telecommunications provider Optus had been hacked. That puts a third of the population at risk of identity theft or fraud, the AP reported. After that, sensitive health data was stolen from health insurance company Medibank. In particular, the company was threatened with contacting key customers and confronting them with their information. This can be around 200 gigabytes of data. Medibank has now admitted that the attackers proved they had the data of at least 100 people.

(mho)