Transcript
I'm Geoff McGrath, I'm a Senior Associate in the TMT team at Ashurst.
One of the big changes happening across various industries at the moment, including in the Energy and Resources sector, is the impact of digital transformation. These changes are driven by advances in technology and connectivity, and in particular, greater access to huge data sets - about consumer preferences, spending activities, service usage and a range of other things.
For the Energy space, recent reforms - along with advances in metering technology - are expected to allow retailers, distributors, regulatory bodies and consumers, to access a range of very detailed data about energy usage. This can be used to help control spend, manage supply, and identify trends in that industry, but this brings with it a range of legal concerns.
Some of the hot topics in this area include: privacy concerns, data security and access to data - particularly where organisations have a very large data set.
In the privacy and security space, regulatory scrutiny is getting tighter. Especially with the mandatory data breach notification laws expected to take effect in early 2018.
And in the data space, regulators in various industries are looking closely at consumers' access to data. Perhaps the most prominent of these proposals is the Productivity Commision's "Report into Data Availability and Use", which called out various private sector data sets, including in the Energy sector. And has made proposals to allow consumers to have open access to, and portability of their own data. This could have a big impact on industries that hold large troves of data.
The key takeaway here is that, with increasing reliance on technology and use of data, these issues are becoming much more important and it's key to understand the impact of privacy, security and other data issues from a legal perspective and right across the business.
