Privacy and Confidentiality Risks in the Agrifood Sector
The Challenge
Integrity Systems Company (ISC) holds a significant amount of data related to the livestock
movements for the Australian red meat industry. The broad concern for ISC is that it is equipped to
manage the balance of privacy and confidentiality against the potential use of the data for the
benefit of industry. Currently ISC receives data access requests from stakeholders or third–party
organisations for access to livestock movement information. ISC responds to data access requests on
a case–by–case basis, releasing data that follows strict processes, such as data treatment,
permissions, and consultation with stakeholders. Invariably this results in releasing data with low
risk. As the processes themselves are used to manage risk, current processes require select
members within ISC, with relevant skills and experience, to assess the risk in the data request and
authorise the release of the data for its purpose detailed in the data request. The level of processing
of the data is designed to reduce risk to suit users and environments where risks in the data may be
poorly controlled, whether those risks are likely or not.
The Project
ISC acknowledges the data it holds could provide value to industry and that current practices
probably restrict the utility and wide use of data released. As such, ISC wanted to better understand
the privacy and confidentiality risk in the data so future data releases could be of more benefit to
industry. This project aimed to understand the risk in the high value data held by ISC and ways to
build capability within ISC to assess the privacy and confidentiality risk more broadly.
The Results
The final project report to ISC is available here: https://www.mla.com.au/research-and-development/reports/2023/investigating-privacy-and-confidentiality-risks-in-isc-data/