The changing face of data privacy attitudes in Australia

With Australian Privacy Awareness Week taking place in May 2021, now feels like a good time to look back on the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner’s (OAIC) 2020 Australian Community Attitudes to Privacy Survey (ACAPS). ACAPS is a long-standing study designed to give a longitudinal picture of Australians' views on data privacy.

The previous survey was in 2017. Since that time, the 2020 survey results indicate individuals’ increasing awareness of data privacy and the desire to influence how organisations hold and use data. Certainly, something we suspected was the case is now backed up by the survey.

Key takeaways:

• 85% of Australians understand why they should protect personal information, but 49% are not clear on how to go about it.
• 76% of Australians identify theft and fraud as their biggest privacy risk, an increase from 19% in the 2017 survey.
• The second largest identified risk was to data security or data breaches, with 61% of respondents identifying this, up from 17% in the 2017 survey.
• 84% of Australians believe they should have the right to ask a business to delete personal information they hold about them.
• 64% believe they should have the right to request deletion of personal data that a government agency holds about them.

While the research and results are focused towards consumer attitudes, there is still a strong underlying message here for those of us managing and running SAP® environments in the enterprise. We see a strong increase in concern around identity theft and data breaches with a desire for requesting data deletion. When checking the 2017 report’s results, we found that personal data removal and deletion was not even discussed at the time. It is certainly of interest to see a topic not mentioned in the previous survey capture such strong feelings three years later.

In the report, Angelene Falk, Australian Information Commissioner and Privacy Commissioner, discusses the importance of the survey result as input to a review underway on the Australian Privacy Act 1988. Falk stated, “The Australian Government has also committed to a new system of fines and penalties for interference with privacy.”

The desire to think differently about data privacy in Australia is being acknowledged. Of course, it remains to be seen how far the community attitude shift in the survey will drive actual change to the Australian Privacy Act and associated penalties. Regardless, there will continue to be more focus on protecting data and reporting on data loss in the future.

I am reminded here of my colleagues' recent journey around GDPR awareness and compliance across Europe. The strong shift to personal data rights with GDPR’s introduction in 2018 sees not just scrambling of personal data on SAP test systems becoming de facto but also a requirement to locate and redact or remove personal data within production systems as a growing and key need. Three years on from GDPR coming into effect, typical requirements from our clients include:

• Reducing the footprint of personally identifiable information (PII) across the SAP estate:
• Only copy what you need to testing environments with Client Sync™ and Object Sync™ (part of the Data Sync Manager (DSM) suite)
• Scramble PII in test systems with Data Secure™
• Manage and reduce PII held in production systems:
• Redact data no longer legally required in production with our SAP Data Privacy Suite.

Where will privacy legislation in Australia be in three years’ time? We do seem to be at the start of an interesting journey, potentially a path taken already by our products and consulting teams. To help understand how your SAP systems and PII data footprint can be managed through reducing, scrambling and redacting please, request a complimentary system analysis.