Your rights

If we need more information from you to assess or help resolve your complaint, we will get in touch.

However, sometimes there are reasons we won’t or can’t investigate. In this event, we will still respond and explain the reasons for our decision. You will not be ignored.

We won’t investigate if you haven't contacted the organisation first and made reasonable efforts

The first thing to do if you believe your privacy has been breached is to contact the business or organisation you think did it and try to sort it out. You should give them at least 30 working days to help you before contacting us.

You then need to make reasonable efforts to resolve the matter directly with the agency. Read more information on how to do this.

We won’t investigate if your complaint is about an old issue

If your complaint is about something that happened more than 12 months ago, we probably won’t investigate it unless there’s a good reason why you didn’t contact us earlier.

For matters that happened some time ago, it may not be practicable or desirable for our Office to look into them.

We won’t investigate if the issue hasn't caused you harm

We’ll only investigate a breach of your privacy if it’s caused you harm. There are three kinds of harm that we can consider:

Specific damage – this could be financial loss, but could also include other forms of damage, such as loss of employment or physical injury.
Loss of benefit – this is where the agency’s actions have adversely affected, or may adversely affect, your rights, benefits, privileges, obligations or interests.
Emotional harm – where the action has resulted in, or may result in, significant humiliation, significant loss of dignity, or significant injury to your feelings. Embarrassment or annoyance is not enough – any emotional harm needs to be ‘significant’.

Other places you can get help

We can only investigate the privacy aspects of your complaint. Our list of other complaint options may help you find other agencies who can better help you.

What the law says

Section 74 of the Privacy Act has a full list of reasons we might not investigate your complaint and includes things like the complaint being a breach of someone else’s privacy, or there being a better way to sort it out.