Greetings from sunny Brisbane!

It’s been a busy week. The IAPP ANZ Summit was held in Sydney on 14 Nov. It was a great day and we were pleased to welcome both the Australian and New Zealand Privacy Commissioners as speakers. There was a lot of interest at the summit about re-identification of personal information and the bill introduced into the Australian Parliament which proposes to make re-identification of private data illegal, and an article in ZDNet reports on one of Timothy Pilgrim’s subsequent speeches where this was also brought up.

John Edwards also invited people to use the NZ Privacy Commission’s "Ask us a question" page.

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Big W, a large Australian retailer has closed its online shopping site after a data leak. In what many would say was a rookie mistake, checkout pages were pre-populated with other customers’ personal data.

The Australian Face Verification Service has been launched by the Federal Minister for Justice. It will share facial information between the federal police, immigration department and the passport office. The system replaces ad-hoc facial image sharing arrangements between the agencies and is intended to improve detection of organised crime syndicates and terrorists.

Privacy is moving forward in many countries in the Asia-Pacific region. Indonesia has just amended its Electronic Information and Transactions Law. Interestingly it has adopted aspects of European approaches to data privacy protection including the right to be forgotten.

In the Philippines, government agencies have been told to implement stricter rules on data sharing by the Philippines National Privacy Commission. 

Singapore’s Personal Data Protection Commission has released an interesting document about how the Tan Tock Seng Hospital Development Fund is protecting sensitive personal data.

China has new cybersecurity laws which are scheduled to come into force in mid-2017. The laws include provisions for the protection of personal information and for disclosure of collection. These changes would bring China in line with most of the basic principles of the EU General Data Protection Regulation.

It would seem that this legislation is much needed as it was revealed that a number of Chinese manufactured phones had pre-installed software that regularly sent data to a Chinese server. The company involved claimed that the software should have only been installed on local (Chinese) phones rather than those destined for overseas.

More news is available from the Digest as always.

Stay curious and catch you soon.

Alex