Hello to all Asia-Pacific Privacy Readers,

This week’s Digest again contains some great items from our region and around the world. 

At the higher, policy end, read about Canada’s push to create rules for accessing citizens’ metadata collection and Australia’s proposal to criminalise the publishing or disseminating of re-identified information. 

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For those with a more applied focus we have some items dealing with the development of specific medical privacy legislation in India, of drone legislation in the U.S., and with the compliance implications for the European General Data Protection Regulation, which has the potential to impact all of us doing business in or with the EU. There is also a very interesting podcast link in the Privacy Advisor series dealing with whether the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield will survive and stalled ‘do not track’ efforts. 

At the more consumer-focused level, we have an exploration of the privacy rights of celebrities, where we consider where the boundary might lie for someone like Kim Kardashian whose celebrity is based on a constant steam of personal information, some of which appears to have contributed to her recently being bound and robbed in Paris. Another recent example could be the ‘other women’ roped into the Brangelina split frenzy in recent weeks who, it appears have been targeted and pursued because of their celebrity, and not much else.

And, of course, we have another salutary data breach involving, surprise, surprise, another online dating site, this time in New Zealand. This breach apparently involved the personal information of 1.5 million users. In the article, the news agency ZDNet expresses some scepticism of the company’s explanation of how the breach was dealt with, ‘questioning the legitimacy of the dating site’s claims.’  Though tongue-in-cheek, this observation probably applies more broadly to much of the [user-generated] content of all dating sites!

We also have some great content dealing with cloud services, big data algorithms, the latest benchmarking survey of how organisations conduct privacy assessments, data mapping and data inventory, and with the dual appointment in Australia of Timothy Pilgrim, as both privacy commissioner and information commissioner.

Finally, check out the list of recently announced inaugural Fellows of Information Privacy.