According to one study, Australian corporations are falling in the face of foreign competition when it comes to protecting the online privacy of their consumers and users.
The Privacy By Design research, conducted through Australian cybersecurity consultancy CyberCX, looked at the online privacy practices of many domestic and foreign corporations operating in Australia, sector by sector.
David Batch, cyberCX’s leading national privacy officer, says privacy regulations are falling into the industry’s shady practices. James Alcock
It found that the retail sector was the worst performer, in part due to its widespread use of hidden trackers and third-party cookies, which track customers’ movement as they move from one site to another, without their knowledge.
“I think if the retail industry were more transparent about what it does and offered consumers a genuine selection, not a selection dressed in dark patterns or buried somewhere on a five-click board, then other people wouldn’t settle for that,” David Batch said. , National Privacy Officer at CyberCX, who led the investigation.
Dark patterns are techniques designed to trick users into accepting the terms and conditions, without the user noticing.
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Apple’s, a company that made user privacy a point of promotion for products like its iPhone, had the most productive privacy practices of any site studied in the research.
Highly regulated industries such as banking and insurance, as well as the government sector, also performed well in the research, which measured Internet sites through 145 privacy-related functionality metrics, such as the use of tracking cookies, if the company’s privacy policy is simple to read, and whether there is a dashboard where users can view and replace their privacy settings.
One thing the study revealed is that corporations operating overseas, especially those operating in Europe and the United States, tend to have much greater privacy practices than corporations operating only in Australia.
The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) sets a much higher bar than Australian privacy laws, and the corporations operating there tend to comply with it across their platform, according to the research.
“And it’s not that the United States has strict privacy laws, but it has a very strong federal industrial commission that doesn’t hesitate to impose hefty fines for privacy violations,” he said.
Batch, who served for thirteen years as a privacy officer at social media, healthcare, banking and consulting companies before moving to CyberCX in 2021, said he noticed that user privacy only got worse, not better, throughout his career, despite regulations like gdpr.
“I don’t think the point of regulation and privacy is higher in proportion to the point of threat to privacy that we face lately.
“Every year exponentially more knowledge about us is collected, there are exponentially more skills to leverage that knowledge, but we don’t see an exponential accumulation in regulation or privacy protections followed through brands.
“If we continue down this path, the machines will know everything about us and will be waiting for our behavior. We have to lift it,” he said.
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