• PRIVACY (MARKET AND SOCIAL RESEARCH) CODE - INDEPENDENT REVIEW UPDATE 
• NEW INFORMATION & DATA SECURITY WEBINAR PROGRAM - STARTS THURSDAY 

As we shift even more of our day-to-day activity online during the COVID-19 pandemic, and cyber-risks increase, Privacy Awareness Week (PAW) is an important reminder to Reboot your privacy.

AMSRO is a long-term supporter of PAW and remains committed to servicing our members and advocating good data privacy practice under the industry's only legislated Privacy (Market and Social Research) Code 2014.

As part of our administrative obligation to independently review the Code every five years (as required by law), AMSRO has now submitted Professor Peter Leonard's Independent Review Report to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) for the Commissioner's consideration. 

Amendments proposed by Professor Leonard include:

• to bring the Code up to date, including addressing changes in the law
• to clarify certain aspects of the operation of the Code that were not as clearly expressed as would be ideal
• to reference relevant guidance and explanatory material that had been released by the OAIC since the Code was registered in 2014.

A copy of the Report and submissions will be made available to members in due course.  In the interim, please see OAIC PAW resources here and AMSRO training modules here.  Should you require any privacy law advice please don't hesitate to contact AMSRO or Andrew Maher, CIE Legal on the AMSRO legal workplace hotline.

AMSRO's focus is on helping members be business-ready, post-COVID-19, to promote rapid and robust recovery. As such, AMSRO in association with our expert consultants is delighted to continue offering our members a wide variety of free training opportunities and services.

INFORMATION AND DATA SECURITY

NEW WORKSHOP PROGRAM

With COVID-19 forcing thousands of employees to work from home, cyber-risk and data security concerns are at an all-time high. For any organisation, information is one of its most valuable assets, and data breaches can cost heavily in terms of lost business and cleaning up the damage. Thus, controls in place need to be rigorous enough to protect your organisation and regularly monitored to keep up with changing risks.   

These workshops are interactive with materials provided to participants ahead of each of the four sessions. Each workshop will then follow a 40-minute format with instruction on how to use the templates and aspects of individual business cases for discussion.

The four sessions cover the following:

1. Introduction to Information and Data Security (the ISO 27001 Standard and the Industry & IS Risk Management process)
2. Communications Security
3. Operations Security
4. People and Assets Security.

SHOWCASE YOUR RESEARCH

Never has there been a more critical time to base decisions on a sound evidence base. To acknowledge and promote the valuable work members are doing during this time, AMSRO has developed a COVID-19 research web page, which showcases individual companies and the findings that their research on COVID-19 has resulted – a resource for clients and society.

AMSRO will be sharing the page once it has been populated with many more research findings. We want to collect as many individual company research findings as we can to showcase to the government and media over the coming weeks as part of our continued advocacy efforts.   

If you would like to participate, please send the following as soon as possible:

• A paragraph about the research 
• A hyperlink to access the relevant content
• A screenshot or company logo.