1 Jan 2017

Digital environment "undermining" Clean Slate Act

10:40 am on 1 January 2017

There is a disjunct between the Clean Slate Act and a person's history online, says the Privacy Commissioner.

Privacy Commissioner John Edwards

Privacy Commissioner John Edwards Photo: Supplied

The act gives people who once committed minor offences the statutory right for those offences to be forgotten after seven years.

Provided they have had a clean record since, they do not have to disclose their criminal record to a potential employer.

But John Edwards said this was being undermined, now that local newspapers had an online archive of stories more than seven-years-old, and employers could search for an applicant's history.

"We've got a disjunct now between the policy settings of the Clean Slate Act and the never-forgetting digital environment and we're going to see a number of similar challenges as we continue to move our lives online."

Meanwhile, the Privacy Act, which governs how organisations collect, use, disclose, store and give access to personal information, is being updated.

John Edwards said the new legislation would make it mandatory for organisations to notify people of data breaches.

He said government departments had raised their game by letting people know about data breaches, but private companies were lagging behind - possibly because they were worried about losing customers if they revealed a breach.

"The new parts of it, that we haven't seen before, will include mandatory data breach notification and I think the need for that is demonstrably urgent."

Mr Edwards said every week there were new breaches, for example one involved 1 billion Yahoo accounts being compromised.

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