★★★★★ 0/5

A Current Affair breaches privacy rules

Nine current affairs is slapped by media watchdog for revealing personal information about an Uber driver.

4
Leave a comment

A Current Affair has been found to have breached privacy rules earlier this year, the media watchdog has found.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority investigated two ACA broadcasts on 19 and 27 February around an “Uber thief.”

The first report was a segment about a passenger who had left their wallet in an Uber and alleged that a bank card from that wallet had been used by the driver of the car.

The second report was on the driver’s subsequent complaint to ACA about the first report, and included information about the driver’s background, identity and professional history.

ACMA determined Nine breached the driver’s privacy in disclosing a date of birth and details of their complaint about ACA in the second episode.

“A Current Affair has stumbled on this occasion, especially in regard to respecting a person’s right to privacy,” ACMA Chair Nerida O’Loughlin said.

“In this instance, the ACMA investigation found there were insufficient public interest grounds for the material to be broadcast.”

ACMA did not advise of any punishment but says Nine will include reference to this decision in future training materials.

4 Responses

  1. “Nine will include reference to this decision in future training materials.” What training materials? Do they exist and who uses them? ACMA said there would be no punishment as they were fresh out of wet lettuce leaves.

    1. I’ve said this before but Australia has a pretty terrible approach to breaches in this area which is always 1) error 2) breach finding 3) fix training. ACMA and networks should audit all training procedures and if need be take 3-4 months to do it. Then everybody has a clean slate and can fix any shortcomings to minimise breaches. This is horse and cart stuff.

Leave a Reply