Introduction
If the reporting of data breaches in online news sources and
Office of the Australian Information Commissioner quarterly reports
during 2019 is anything to go by, Australian Government agencies
continue to perform well relative to the private sector in terms of
privacy compliance. However, as some of the data breach incidents
which occurred in 2019 in other jurisdictions indicate, agencies
must continue to be vigilant in their approach to ensuring
compliance with privacy obligations and protecting against data
breaches.
For example, in one of 2019's particularly unsettling
international cyber incidents, Ecuadorian authorities began an
investigation in September into the leak of approximately 20
million citizens' personal information – potentially
Ecuador's entire population, plus millions of deceased
citizens. The data, exposed online via an
