Is my privacy really protected under Australian law?

Consider these three privacy incidents:

• The Minister for Human Services releases to a reporter the personal details of a welfare recipient who had publicly criticised the government.
• A woman secretly places a hidden camera in her father's room in a nursing home to record what happens because she fears he is being abused by a staff member.
• A CCTV camera in an apartment block records a couple who are not married to each other in an intimate activity in the lift.

All of these incidents raise questions of privacy, which is an increasingly vexed legal area in today's world of hi-tech surveillance and the storing of personal data on all of us.

State and federal laws designed to protect privacy