As our lives have become increasingly digitised, we routinely allow businesses to have our personal information and track our online activity. It now seems almost equally routine to read that the safeguards major corporations place around this data have been breached, whether it is the result of malicious hackers (Optus, Qantas), errors in data handling (Telstra) or employees abusing their access to private information (American Express).

These breaches have the potential to affect millions of Australians. And they are part of a growing trend. Abigail Bradshaw, the director-general of the Australian Signals Directorate, said recently that the agency had responded to 1200 cybersecurity incidents in the latest financial year – up 11 per cent – and notified critical infrastructure entities about potential malicious activity affecting their networks 190 times, more than double the figure for the previous year.

More could be done to protect Australians from data breaches.Credit: Bloomberg

But the sanctions companies face for failing to protect data suggest that the threat is one we’re prepared to live with, an accepted price of doing business online.

This month, in a first for this country, the pathology services provider Australian Clinical Labs was ordered by the Federal Court to pay $5.8 million in penalties over a data breach that exposed the personal information of 223,000 people. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC)

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