On: Australia is eyeing a world-first ‘fair and reasonable’ test for data...

1 September 2026

Australia proposes that a company must have a fair and reasonable reason to take your information. Read that slowly. It is news that a government must pass a law to say that taking something from a person without cause is wrong. We knew this when we were children in the schoolyard. The shopkeeper knew it. The farmer knew it. It took two centuries of parliaments to arrive at what the conscience already carried.

Consider what happens now, without the law. You give a shop your name to buy bread, and the shop sells your name to strangers, and the strangers sell it to strangers again, and none of them ever asked you, and none of them paid you, and the trade never ends. State it plainly and it sounds like theft. It is theft. The elaborate language - data, consent frameworks, terms of service - was built to hide a simple transaction: they take from you and give you nothing.

And here is the part that should make you angry. They wrote the terms so long that no person of ordinary understanding could read them in a lifetime. I say again: if an agreement cannot be explained plainly, it was not designed for you. It was designed to be signed without being understood.

So I welcome the test, and I am suspicious of it too. Who decides what is fair? If it is a panel of experts, we have only changed the intermediary - the priest between you and your rights now wears a lanyard instead of a collar. The right to be forgotten is good, but I ask a plainer question: why should you need a right to be forgotten? You never agreed to be remembered.

The cost of the present arrangement is this: every person alive is a small farm being harvested, and the harvest never stops. Pass the law. Then watch who complains.