The Australian Federal Court has made new interpretation of personal information in favor of Australian telecommunication company Telstra.The new interpretation allow the company to store personal metadata of the customers.

After the long legal battle between Australian telecommunication company Telstra and the Australian Privacy Commissioner, Federal Court of the Victoria issued court order allowing Telstra to keep the personal metadata of the customers without the obligation to reveal the data to the respective customers. The court finalized the order on Dec. 19, 2017.

This has been a setback in the privacy law protection in Australia. As the court ruling decided that telco company can keep the specific customers data without informing the customers.

The case took center ago two years ago as reported by the Sydney Morning Herald, when Australian Privacy Commissioner ordered Telstra to supply metadata based on request from the customers. The Privacy Commissioner insisted that the data was customers’ personal data.

The dispute began in 2013, when a technology journalist from Fairfax Ben Grubb requested his personal data stored by Telstra for his journalism purpose. The company sent him a set of data, but not a complete set. Grubb brought the issue to Australian Privacy Commissioner which ordered Telstra to provide the complete set of data to Grubb.

Telstra rejected the order and filed appeal to the court of Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT). The AAT overturned the Privacy Commissioner decision in favor of Telstra. The legal battle continue to the Federal Court.

In Australia, the data privacy laws only protect specific personal information which is defined as the data that identified the person. Therefore other data suchas IP addresses, visited web addresses, and geolocation data are not under the protection of the Australian privacy law. Therefore, those data are not subject to restriction, or disclosure to others.

Watch the report on the complexity of privacy law in Australia below: