In Australia, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) is leading a campaign this Privacy Awareness Week focusing on getting ‘back to basics’.

It highlights some of the simple but fundamental steps individuals and businesses can take to protect privacy. This includes:

• Know your obligations – Don’t just ‘tick the boxes’. Anticipate how your customers and the wider community expect you to handle their personal information and respond to their needs and concerns.
• Have a privacy plan – Make sure you have a privacy management plan in place to help embed a culture of privacy and establish robust privacy practices.
• Appoint privacy champions - Appoint staff responsible for managing privacy day-to-day, including handling internal and external privacy enquiries, complaints, and access and correction requests.
• Assess privacy risks – Undertake a privacy impact assessment for projects that involve new information handling practices, such as new technologies.
• Only collect or keep what you need – Over-collection of personal information increases your risk in the event of a data breach. It can also undermine customer trust.
• Secure personal information – Ensure secure systems are in place to protect personal information from misuse, loss and unauthorised access and disclosure.
• Simplify your privacy policy – Don’t treat the privacy policy as a legal document to manage legal risk. It should be a document that creates trust in your entity and speaks to your customers or clients.
• Train your staff – Clearly outline how staff are expected to handle personal information in their everyday duties, not just in terms of general principles. Make it real, and relevant.
• Prepare for data breaches – Your data breach response plan should outline your entity’s strategy for containing, assessing and managing the incident from start to finish.
• Review your practices – By continually improving your privacy processes, you will ensure you are responsive to new privacy issues and that implementation will not be a burden.

How the Victorian Chamber can help

The Victorian Chamber has always been focused on protecting the data entrusted to us by customers and members.

To certify this commitment last year the Chamber obtained ISO27001 certification, the peak international standard on managing information security.

The Victorian Chamber also contributed to the Australian Government Attorney-General’s Department’s Privacy Act Review Report, aimed at strengthening the protection of personal information and the control individuals have over their information, supporting digital innovation and enhance Australia’s reputation as a trusted trading partner.

The Chamber can now help businesses learn the essential skills needed to protect business assets for their business, employees and customers through a newly launched self-paced learning course, Cyber Security Essentials for Business.

In our modern business landscape, it is essential to protect your business data against cyber-attacks and unauthorised access. Not only can an attack have a financial impact on business but it can also damage reputation, disrupt essential services and drive away customers.

This course helps explain:

• what cyber security is and why it is important
• how you can help protect business assets
• what you can do to protect information online
• how cyber scams work and what to look out for
• how to identify and manage malicious software incidents
• where to identify resources that can uplift your cyber security maturity.

The module can be completed remotely at any time and will take around 20-30 minutes to complete. More information and registration is available at Cyber Security Essentials for Business - Selfpaced Learning.

Victorian Chamber Executive Director - Information, Communication and Technology Glenn Goodwin said: "Recent cyber incidents have reminded us how important privacy fundamentals are for businesses.

"The focus of getting 'back to basics' during Privacy Awareness Week ensures that the practices to keep data safe and the ethics to use it responsibly are understood. Corporate privacy and cybersecurity are not the same but inter-related and businesses need to ensure they get the essentials right for both.

"I’m proud to have been an advisor on the creation of the Victorian Chamber Cyber Security Essentials online training module that provides an easy to digest foundation on cyber security for businesses and their employees. This training complements the ‘back to basics’ content provided in Privacy Awareness week and together are a great start to keeping data safe."