As of yesterday all Australian private information is protected by new and updated laws in the Australian Privacy Act.
Firstly don’t be scared into thinking the sky is falling down. These new laws are designed to clean up industries. If you’re doing the right thing and using a platform that adheres to the strictest of Permission Marketing guidelines you and your customers are protected.
There are some Australian Privacy Principles (APP) that Entities (in our case businesses) who hold or use data deemed to be private (like your email, name, address and birthday) must now abide by.
This is great news for Australians as it is a big step in the direction by our Government to update our privacy laws for the age we’re living in.
So, what’s in this new piece of legislation that may affect you or your business? The new laws centre a lot around accountability and data storage.
The accountability aspect has to do with you being upfront with how you plan on using data you collect and only using it for the expressed purposes you collected it for.
For example, if a business asks people for their email, name, address and birthday so they can send them great, personalised email content, then that’s all that can be done with that information.
This is standard best practice here at Sign-Up.to and we’ve always enforced it as part of our own Terms of Service. What’s great is now the Australian Government is requiring business to adhere to best practices by law instead of just recommending them.
When it comes to data disclosure (including storage), The government has now made you responsible for upholding Australian laws even when that data is held overseas. It also means that if something happens to that data, you are accountable.
Sign-Up.to’s data is currently securely stored in the UK on our own servers. This means that all the information in this section is specifically relevant to us and our clients. The data protection laws in the UK are much more strict than even these new Australian laws and our Terms of Service along with our guiding Permission Marketing principals go even further.
This means that we’re 100% compliant with the update.
It also means that Australia is taking the right steps to avoid a monopoly and can continue to allow Australian business to use global software while protecting the data rights of its citizens. If they were to impose an offshore blacklist then Australia would simply drop off the internet. Think about your Google Mail, your Dropbox files or your CRM software.
At the end of the day this piece of legislation tells business: you can use Australian’s data but only to make their experiences with you better and safer – something we’ve been on about at Sign-Up.to for over 10 years now!