Australia Passes $A50 Million Data Privacy Penalties
Australia Passes $A50 Million Data Privacy Penalties – Eye-watering new privacy penalties for data breaches have been passed by the Australian Government after receiving royal assent from the Governor-General.
The upgraded penalties come after multiple data breaches during 2022 comprised customer information, with organisations in Australia hit including Bunnings, Deakin University, Amart, American Airlines, Cisco, University of WA, Twitter, TikTok, Uber, Optus, Telstra, ADF, and Medibank, to name a few.
Existing penalties, which topped out at $2.2 million, have been massively increased. Fines are now up to $50 million, or 30 per cent of adjusted turnover, or 3x any financial benefit obtained through data misuse for more egregious breaches.
“The government has wasted no time in responding to recent major data breaches,” Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus said in a statement. “We have announced, introduced and delivered legislation in just over a month.
“These new, larger penalties send a clear message to large companies that they must…protect the data they collect.”
The penalties significantly increase the importance security providers, including monitoring stations, access control providers, security integrators and end users must attach to securing databases, most of which contain serious levels of personal information.
As well as protecting databases, which may include biometrics, it’s also vital for security providers at all layers of the market to ensure communications between nodes, buildings, sites, data centres and authorised workstations and smart devices, offer the highest possible levels of cyber security.
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