3. Who Owns The Data?


More information on who owns the data…

 

Freedom of Information

In Australia the federal Freedom of Information Act 1982 and in NSW the New South Wales Freedom of Information Act 1989 are the legal documents specifying the laws in regard to an individual’s access to information.

Currently these acts only apply to government departments and their related statutory authorities – they do not apply to commercial organisations. In other countries freedom of information law covers organisations of all types.

What agencies and other public bodies can give me this information?

Agencies and public bodies that must give you information under FOI include:

  • Government departments and authorities
  • State boards and committees
  • Government Ministers
  • Local and municipal councils
  • Universities
  • Public hospitals
  • Regulatory bodies eg the Harness Racing Authority

 

Protecting our Privacy

In NSW, privacy is legally protected via the federal Privacy Act 1988 (Cth), the NSW Privacy and Personal Information Protection Act 1998 and also the Health Records and Information Privacy Act 2002. We shall concentrate on the federal privacy legislation. This legislation contains ten National Privacy Principles (NPPs), that set standards that organisations are required to meet when dealing with personal information; the text in the figure on the next page briefly explains each of these principles.



Armed with this information and what else you researched about, try answering the following 10 multiple choice questions:


Data warehousing and data mining

A data warehouse is a database that collects information from different data sources.
  • It is a storage area of raw data that can be analysed to assist organisations to make decisions.
  • A data warehouse involves careful planning to decide what data to collect. 
  • The contents of a data warehouse are usually historical and static. 
  • However, they will change if new requirements are identified. 
  • A more sophisticated approach to obtaining information is to use data mining.

Data mining is a process that looks for relationships and patterns in the data stored in a database. 
  • It sorts through the data and turns up interesting and useful connections. 
  • For example, data mining could be used to analyse the transactions at a supermarket. 
  • It might determine that there was a relationship between tomato sauce sales and meat pie sales. 
  • This information might be useful for marketing promotions.
  • One problem with data mining is that many of the patterns occur by chance and have no value in making decisions. 
  • It also raises issues of privacy and ownership of data.




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