Happy new year, privacy pros!

This week, Australia has thankfully had some relief from the tragic bushfires affecting massive portions of the country. But a recent New York Times story from Kashmir Hill has the privacy world focusing on Australia as the home of facial-recognition startup Clearview AI. The company's technology enables law enforcement to upload a photo of an individual and use that picture to conduct a search across the internet for other photos of the individual pictured, along with the sources of those pictures.

This news comes just as the EU is considering imposing a moratorium on the use of facial-recognition technology, with Google coming out in support of the approach and Microsoft cautioning that a blanket ban would curtail many beneficial uses of the technology.

Read more on the facial-recognition debate in Jedidiah Bracy's article in Privacy Perspectives and Nicole Stephensen's thoughtful opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald.

The Hong Kong government is considering significantly strengthening its privacy regime, which would compel organizations to report data breaches within five days and empower the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data to directly impose fines proportionate to the offender's global revenue. Also, with the flood of "doxing" events in the wake of the recent unrest, the privacy commissioner may gain new investigative and prosecutorial powers specifically aimed at taking on the practice.

It may seem as though we just finished with the 2019 IAPP ANZ Privacy Summit in Sydney, but we're already preparing for the 2020 event, and our call for speaking proposals is open. Submit your proposal to contribute to the success of this year's premier ANZ privacy event.

Finally, some of the IAPP's most useful content comes from its members. The IAPP has a variety of publications through which you can share your insights with more than 50,000 IAPP members around the world. Perhaps you have written a blog post walking through the ins and outs of a new privacy law or are interested in sharing the novel way in which your company is approaching privacy, or you are completing research into a new privacy-enhancing technology — contact your IAPP country leader or the IAPP publications team at publications@iapp.org so that we can help you get the word out to the rest of our members.

Check the links below for other privacy news from the Asia-Pacific region and beyond.