Privacy breach following combining information from public sources...

The Privacy Commissioner has found a company in breach of the Privacy Act after it accessed and combined data from two publicly available data sources of property ownership.

Both sets of information were accurate, but when combined they became inaccurate as they did not differentiate between people with the same name.

The Privacy Commissioner held that the company did not do enough to ensure the combined data it published was accurate and this was a privacy breach.

The company’s licence to access the data was terminated following the decision.

If you use data provided by another source, you remain liable to ensure the data is accurate for the purpose you use if you manipulate the data and get inaccurate results.

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