Delving into Data Privacy

Data security is front page news this week following the egregious hack of Australia’s third biggest telco, Optus, and the resulting threat to hundreds of thousands of customers’ data.

All this talk about data security raises an equally important question: what about data privacy? Often when confronted with questions about data privacy, corporate CIOs will give a data security answer but that’s only part of the equation when it comes to fully protecting customer data.

Data privacy was the subject of the latest in the NSW Smart Sensing Network’s (NSSN) Data Working Group lunchtime learning series on 21 September, hosted at the University of Sydney.

International data privacy expert and President of FitzPatrick & Associates, Sheila FitzPatrick, spoke on the fast-evolving nature of data privacy laws around the globe and the risk – both reputational and financial – to organisations of not staying abreast of trends, laws and technologies in the area.

Jurisdictions around the world – led notably by the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – are playing catch-up to the serious issue of data privacy and legislation is starting to show real teeth in pursuing and punishing organisations that don’t comply. Australia, while lagging, won’t be far behind.

“Most organisations still think security equals privacy”, said Ms FitzPatrick. “Compliance cannot be bought in a box. Organisations need to take data privacy more seriously and build it more intrinsically into their systems”.

Sensor networks are collecting ever-increasing streams of data. The explosion in the Internet-of-Things, backed by advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as a growing push for greater adoption of open data, are all opening exciting new opportunities but do present an inherent risk to data privacy.

“The important thing is learning how to mitigate those risks so that you can take advantage of new technologies but not expose personal data to risk”, said Ms FitzPatrick.

The seminar also featured a presentation by the University of Sydney’s Data Governance Lead, Michelle Martin. Michelle and her team provided a practical perspective on how the University is implementing privacy by design into its complex data systems and leveraging technology to both protect data privacy and remain compliant with increasingly strict legislation. 

The NSSN Data Working Group is a regular series of lunchtime learning events that aims to bring together data scientists from across the NSSN’s member universities to learn, network and share ideas.