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Who can access your data?

Leon Della Bosca

Telecommunications industry group Communications Alliance has published a list of the organisations that can access your metadata under the guise of preventing criminal activity.

Put simply, metadata is data that describes and gives information about other data.

Phone metadata refers to information about a phone call, such as when it was made, whom it was made to and from, where it was made and how long it lasted.

Internet metadata is a more complicated area, which has been anything but clarified by our politicians. It typically relates to similar information, such as what website a person accessed, for how long, where they accessed it from and any online aliases they may use.

Dozens of state and federal departments and agencies are qualified for warrant-free access to your metadata and information kept by telcos and internet providers, since the 2015 legislation that introduced the data retention regime was implemented.

However, Communications Alliance chief executive John Stanton said that there has been “some authority creep, I guess you might call it, in the period since the data retention regime came into place”, he said, referring to the increasing number of organisations that have requested data access.

Section 313 of the Telecommunications Act requires telcos to “give officers and authorities of the Commonwealth and of the states and territories such help as is reasonably necessary” for “enforcing the criminal law and laws imposing pecuniary penalties”, “assisting the enforcement of the criminal laws in force in a foreign country”, “protecting the public revenue”, and “safeguarding national security”.

However, in addition to police agencies and other organisations listed in the data retention legislation, organisations such as Centrelink, the Australian Taxation Office, Australia Post’s Corporate Security Group, Workplace Health and Safety, Work Safe Victoria, the Taxi Services Commission and a number of local councils also now have access to information about your phone and internet activity.

The following is the full list published by Communications Alliance:

 

Read more at Computerworld

Were you aware that all of these organisations have access to your data? Of these organisations, which do you think are over-reaching with their authority?

Related articles:
Government wants to access your phone
Keep your metadata private
How to turn off your spying tech

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