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ARTICLE · 29 JULY 2026

Not Just Marketing. It’s Personal. OAIC’s Warning

Bartier Perry Solicitors
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The Australian privacy regulator has fundamentally reframed how tracking pixels must be assessed under privacy law, particularly in sensitive contexts like healthcare. Recent enforcement actions reveal that common digital marketing tools can constitute the collection and disclosure of sensitive personal information, requiring explicit consent and robust governance frameworks that many organisations currently lack.

AustraliaPrivacy
Michael Cossetto
Michael Cossetto
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The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) has brought renewed attention to a risk that many organisations have historically treated as marginal: the use of third party tracking pixels. As reflected in the recent OAIC report ‘Your life, pixelated: how tracking pixels watch your every click’ and the regulator’s recent determinations against Medmateand Monash IVF, there has been a clear shift in how Australian privacy law approaches online data collection.

At its core, the OAIC’s message is direct and confronting: tracking pixels are not simply benign analytics tools. Where deployed in contexts that reveal sensitive information - particularly health-related environments - they can amount to the collection and disclosure of sensitive information requiring consent. 

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