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If you work in a small practice or medical centre, there’s every chance you may not have received many requests for personal information from patients. The starting point is to know that the Privacy Act gives people the right to make a request for information that is about them.
We often get asked about how much a complaint is “worth” in settlement terms, by both complainants and respondents. To be honest, very few of our complaints settle for money. The resolution is usually non-financial, like the release of information or a decent apology.
Should a business use social media to shame scam artists, shoplifters or bad debtors? When someone feels ripped off, this appears a natural course of action but it is a risky path to go down. Our advice is if you believe you have evidence that a crime has been committed, contact Police.
Let’s recap. The Privacy Act gives people the right to access their information. And when a person requests their information, the organisation or business must respond to the request within 20 working days.
You have the right not to remain silent – and that includes when you think you might have been overcharged for work done on your car.
When we use the metaphor ‘to come with clean hands’, it means to have done nothing underhand or illegal. It’s a term that applies in the context of resolving privacy disputes. There’s a general expectation that if you make a complaint to our office, you did not bring the breach of privacy upon yourself through your actions.
If yours is a small business or organisation, there’s every chance you may be fairly inexperienced in what to do if you receive a request for personal information. But we hope you are at least aware that the Privacy Act gives people the right to make a request for information that is about them.
It is said that a sincere apology should include the three Rs – regret, responsibility and remedy. Why apologise and how to do it properly is a subject we’ve discussed before. But we continue to see apologies that fail to convince a complainant. So it’s something we thought we’d revisit in this post because the quality of an apology is an important part of our efforts to resolve privacy complaints.
