The Federal Court has recently denied a request by an individual to access metadata held by a telco which related to the person’s calls.
What is the impact of this decision on privacy?
This decision leaves open the issue of whether metadata is personal information and therefore must be provided on request to customers of a business.
For an individual, the information must be “about” them before it needs to be assessed whether the person’s identity can be established from the information.
For businesses, it is still unclear what nature of information must be made available on request.
For more information, see the most recent edition of Snippets: Snippets February 2017