Hub Member Katharine Kemp breaks new ground on unlawful data enrichment and Australia's forgotten privacy principle

Hub Member Dr Katharine Kemp has been exceptionally busy of late, following the publication of a new paper on data enrichment and privacy law! 

The paper in question, Australia’s Forgotten Privacy Principle: Why Common ‘Enrichment’ of Customer Data for Profiling and Targeting is Unlawful, gained significant attention with over 100 downloads in the first two days after its publication on 21 September this year. You can read the full paper here.

In this new publication, Dr Kemp dives into the practice of "data enrichment", wherein companies beef up their customer profiles with additional personal data gathered from third party sources. But in their effort to know more about us, organisations have commonly overstepped over the boundaries of lawfulness, ignoring the Australian Privacy Principle 3.6(b), a section of the Privacy Act which has to date, never been enforced against organisations engaging in unlawful data enrichment.  

Here are some of Dr Kemp's shorter articles on the topic, also published in September: 

Her article for The Conversation, This law makes it illegal for companies to collect third-party data to profile you. But they do anyway.

The op-ed she wrote for Choice, Why we need to enforce existing laws against ‘data enrichment’.

Dr Kemp has followed all of this with several radio interviews with ABC radio and Perth Live radio

Of course, the conversation hasn't stopped there, with the paper and recent articles spurring a growing number of discussions, articles and podcasts on the topic, including: 

Article by Mi3 editor, The ‘forgotten’ privacy principle that could derail Australia’s data enrichment industry

A This week in digital trust podcast episode, featuring privacy law experts discussing Dr Kemp's original paper at Eleven M: Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify

Congratulations to Katharine on her influential new publication. This is an ongoing story which continues to gain momentum and we are fascinated to see where it will go next. 

You can follow Dr Katharine Kemp on Twitter via @Katharine_Kemp or LinkedIn. 

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