The Privacy Act regulates the way in which APP entities handle ‘personal information’. There are sub-sets of personal information, namely ‘sensitive information’ and ‘health information’, that are subject to a higher level of protection than personal information, about which it is advisable to obtain specialist legal advice.
'Data’ can be broadly defined as any information that has been reduced to characters, words, numbers, images, sound or video. Data can be collected to form 'datasets', a collection or record of data organised according to a common context or criteria.
Data can be categorised according to the nature of the information it contains, for example, health data, personal data, research data, business data and consumer data.
The amount of data created globally is growing at an exponential rate. Data can be a major source of value for businesses in an economic sense, and valuable to individuals on privacy grounds.
The principal statute regulating the collection, use, storage and disclosure of ‘personal information’ is the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and in particular the 13 Australian Privacy Principles (APPs) that form part of that Act. The Privacy Act is administered by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner and the Australian Privacy Commissioner within that office.
Confidentiality Agreements are frequently entered into to protect the disclosure of confidential information during negotiations for the sale of a business, for the purposes of a partnership or joint venture, when engaging an external consultant and in employment contracts.
Whilst the confidential information disclosed in these scenarios may be protected by general law (equity), it is often preferable to require recipients of confidential information to enter into Confidentiality Agreements before receipt so that:
the recipient is prevented from claiming that the disclosed information is not confidential;
the identity and scope of the confidential information, as well as any exceptions to the obligation of confidentiality, are clearly defined; and
contractual rights and obligations, beyond the protections afforded by general law, are created.
You only have until the end of this month to apply for your director identification number (DIN) if you have not done so. There are tough penalties for directors who do not obtain their DIN by the end of November 2022. Fines could be as much as $1.1 million for failure to have a DIN when required.
A contracting party can seek to reduce its possible exposure for loss caused by breach of contract by requiring the other party or a third party to provide contractual promises in the form of guarantees or indemnities.
While they are common contractual clauses, particularly in commercial bargains, guarantees and indemnities are subject to special rules of interpretation and need to be drafted carefully.
Guarantees and indemnities can be used separately or together, and can also be used with other risk allocation clauses such as liquidated damages, exclusion, warranty and insurance clauses.
One of the principal ways in which a buyer will seek to protect itself in a transaction is by requiring the seller to provide warranties about the business in the business purchase agreement. If it later transpires that the warranty was inaccurate and this causes the buyer loss, the buyer may have remedies against the seller.
The buyer can also seek to include a requirement that the seller indemnify it against any losses the buyer sustains as a result of a breach by the seller of a warranty or other provision of the agreement.
eConveyancing is the use of a web-based platform to conduct property settlement transactions. The eConveyancing platform facilitates the preparation, execution and lodgment of land title documents electronically and allows financial settlements to occur digitally through the electronic transfer of funds. There are currently two approved Electronic Lodgement Network Operators (ELNOs) in the market: PEXA and Sympli.
The idea for the SAFT is derived from the ‘Simple Agreement for Future Equity’, or SAFE. The SAFE has been widely used for financing purposes among early-stage companies, and acts as an investment instrument alternative to convertible debt. Although SAFE templates can differ, the overall goal was to create a set of basic funding terms startups and investors can adhere to while deferring decisions about valuation, liquidation preferences and participation rights until later-stage rounds of financing.
Decentralized finance or DeFi is a financial system that reimagines financial transactions by removing intermediaries and is based on blockchain technology, typically Ethereum. Various financial transactions are possible with DeFi's 'smart contracts' that execute financial transactions under certain conditions.
DAO, or decentralized autonomous organization, is a community-led entity with no central authority. It is entirely autonomous and transparent and follows smart contracts to lay the foundational rules, execute the agreed-upon community-led decisions, proposals, and votings.
The DIN regime is a key part of the Modernising Business Registers (MBR) Program, allowing for more effective tracking of directors and their corporate history, providing traceability of a director's relationships across companies, reducing the use of fictitious identities and improving data integrity and security.
