Recent proposals to reform data protection laws in the EU and Australia: a comparative analysis

Data protection laws designed to balance the desire for individual privacy with business and government usage of personal information have spread around the world over the last few decades. After the first wave of regulation in the 1980s and 1990s, the continued growth of internet usage has highlighted shortcomings in those regulations. This has spurred a more recent wave of reform in data protection laws in many jurisdictions. This article gives an overview of recent data protection reform efforts in two federal regulatory systems, the European Union and Australia. It then explores the history of those reform efforts and compares several significant differences between these approaches.