The costly realities of a privacy breach

Privacy breaches are commonplace. As an organisation, you must ensure you are following procedures.  Ensuring your customer’s personal information is stored securely in addition to only using it for its intended purpose.  In this blog, we talk about the costly realities of a privacy breach, your responsibilities and how we can assist.

Learn from others

Recent events show how important it is to have a process in place.  Not so long ago, over 69,000 users were impacted by a hacker when LimeVPN suffered a major data breach and likewise when NSW Health was also attacked is a similar instance. Patients’ information was shared on the web. Thankfully they followed the right steps to get this remedied as soon as possible.

Alarming facts

Overall, there were 446 data breaches reported in the first six months of 2021 in Australia, with entities in healthcare, finance, legal, accounting and management, insurance and the government all being affected.

Public, private, and non-profit sectors can be affected by privacy breaches, so it’s important you have procedures in place.

Your responsibilities

The Australian Privacy Act requires you to follow a strict set of rules when handling personal information, including:

• Collecting personal information
• Holding personal information
• Using and sharing personal information

In addition, there are also different privacy rules for specific industries that you may need to be aware of.

How can we help you?

We’re here to help your business be legally compliant with the Privacy Act amendments.

We will work with you to:

• Ensure you are compliant by exploring each part of your internal practices
• Assess your business documentation such as your Terms and Conditions of Trade to confirm your business is protected
• Provide a privacy policy in addition to website terms of use. This will ensure both customers and staff see that your company can be trusted with key personal data

What’s next?

We are on hand to get you sorted.