Digital Privacy: GDPR and Its Lessons for Australia

Australia’s Privacy Act 1988 is under review with a view to bringing Australia’s privacy laws into the digital era, more in line with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This article discusses how the GDPR can be refined and standardized to be more effective in protecting privacy in the digital era while not adversely affecting the digital economy that relies heavily on data. We argue that an ideal data policy should be informative and transparent about the potential privacy costs while giving consumers a menu of opt-in choices into which they can self-select themselves.