Describe your business, leave with a checklist you can assign

Collect personal information only where reasonably necessary for the entity’s functions or activities. Sensitive information, including health information, biometric information and biometric templates, generally requires the individual’s consent and must be directly related to the entity’s functions or activities. OAIC states that many photographs or recordings of individuals, including artificially generated ones, contain sensitive information and therefore may not be scraped from the web or taken from a third-party dataset without establishing consent.

Evidence: Collection necessity assessment records; Sensitive information identification and consent records; Due diligence on third-party dataset provenance and the consent chain; Sensitive-information screening report for image and audio datasets

Before disclosing personal information to a recipient outside Australia, take reasonable steps to ensure the recipient does not breach the APPs, subject to the statutory exceptions. Section 16C extends accountability so that, in defined circumstances, an act of the overseas recipient is taken to be an act of the disclosing entity. Routing Australian user data to an affiliate or vendor in China requires contractual and supervisory arrangements built on this basis.

Evidence: Overseas disclosure register: recipient, country, data categories, purpose; Evidence of the reasonable steps taken: contract clauses, due diligence, audit rights; Assessment records where an exception is relied on; Disclosure of the countries of overseas recipients in the privacy policy

Open tool: Transfer Matrix

Take reasonable steps to protect personal information held from misuse, interference, loss, and unauthorised access, modification or disclosure, and to destroy or de-identify it once it is no longer needed for any permitted purpose and is not required to be retained by law or court order. In AI contexts this must expressly cover training sets, prompt logs and vector indexes.

Evidence: Inventory of security controls with implementation evidence; Retention schedule covering training sets and logs; Destruction and de-identification execution records; Justification that the steps taken are proportionate to the risk

Where there are reasonable grounds to believe an eligible data breach has occurred, notify the Australian Information Commissioner and affected individuals promptly; where there are only reasonable grounds to suspect one, carry out a reasonable and expeditious assessment to determine whether it is an eligible data breach. The trigger for starting an assessment, the responsible owner and the external notice templates should be settled in advance.

Evidence: Incident response plan including the NDB assessment trigger; Assessment record and conclusion; Statement filed with the Commissioner and its acknowledgement; Notice text to affected individuals and proof of dispatch

AI incident and serious incident reporting record (register plus report drafts)

Under APP 1, maintain a clearly expressed, up-to-date and freely available APP privacy policy stating the kinds of personal information collected and held, how it is collected and held, the purposes of collection, how individuals may access and correct it, how to complain and how complaints are handled, and whether the entity is likely to disclose to overseas recipients and in which countries. Also implement practices, procedures and systems ensuring compliance with the APPs and enabling inquiries and complaints to be dealt with.

Evidence: Full APP privacy policy with version history; Privacy management plan and allocation of compliance responsibility; Register of inquiries and complaints; Annual policy review records

At or before the time of collection, or as soon as practicable after, take reasonable steps to notify the individual of the APP 5.2 matters, including the entity’s identity and contact details, the fact and circumstances of collection (particularly where collected from a third party rather than the individual), the purposes, the consequences of not providing the information, the entities to which it is usually disclosed, how to access, correct and complain, and whether the entity is likely to disclose to overseas recipients and in which countries.

Evidence: Collection notice text covering every APP 5.2 matter; Assessment of the method and reasonable steps used for indirect collection; Proof of delivery of the notice; List of countries of overseas disclosure

New APP 1.7 provides that where (a) an APP entity has arranged for a computer program to make, or do a thing substantially and directly related to making, a decision; (b) the decision could reasonably be expected to significantly affect the rights or interests of an individual; and (c) personal information about that individual is used in the operation of the program to make the decision or do that thing — the entity’s APP privacy policy must contain the information covered by APP 1.8, namely: the kinds of personal information used in the operation of such programs; the kinds of such decisions made solely by the operation of such programs; and the kinds of such decisions for which a thing substantially and directly related to making the decision is done by such programs. APP 1.9 confirms that making a decision includes refusing or failing to make one, and doing a thing includes refusing or failing to do it. APP 1.7 is also added to the s.13K list of provisions for which infringement notices may issue.

Evidence: Inventory of automated decisions with the significant-effect assessment and the human-machine split described; List of personal information fields used for each class of decision; The updated APP privacy policy clauses with an effective-date record; Coverage check for refusals and failures to decide; Mechanism keeping the policy in step with model or rule changes

Before putting any dataset into pre-training or fine-tuning, determine whether it contains personal information — particularly where the provenance is unclear — and comply with the resulting obligations; public availability or accessibility is not itself a lawful basis. Additional steps such as deleting information may be needed. Collection must also respect the APP 3 necessity limit: collect only personal information reasonably necessary for the entity’s functions or activities, draft appropriate parameters for what is included when compiling a generative AI dataset, and implement mechanisms to filter out unnecessary personal information.

Evidence: Assessment of the personal information content of each dataset; Documented inclusion parameters and filtering rules; Deletion or de-identification execution records; Due diligence conclusions on data of unclear provenance

Data Card — datasheet for a training, validation or test dataset

OAIC states that sensitive information generally requires consent to be collected, and that many photographs or recordings of individuals, including artificially generated ones, contain sensitive information and therefore may not be scraped from the web or collected from a third-party dataset without establishing consent. Companies planning to train face, portrait or voice models must build the consent-chain check into dataset construction rather than remediate before launch.

Evidence: Sensitive-information screening reports for image and audio datasets; Consent-chain verification records, including consent evidence from third-party dataset suppliers; Exclusion or deletion records where consent could not be established; Legal review of the intended use of images of people

Where personal information already held is to be used to train an AI model and that was not a primary purpose of collection, confirm whether consent for that secondary AI-related purpose exists; if not, establish that the secondary use would be reasonably expected by the individual, taking particular account of their expectations at the time of collection, and that it is related — directly related for sensitive information — to the primary purpose, or that another exception applies. Where that cannot be clearly established, seek consent for the use and/or offer a meaningful and informed opt-out to avoid regulatory risk.

Evidence: Secondary-purpose assessment addressing both reasonable expectation and relatedness; The notice given at original collection and evidence of user expectations, including historical privacy policy versions; Implementation and execution records for the consent or opt-out mechanism; A separate record of the direct-relatedness determination for sensitive information

Data Card — datasheet for a training, validation or test dataset

OAIC notes that generative AI models are probabilistic, do not understand the data they handle or generate, and are known to produce inaccurate or false results. Under APP 10, developers must take reasonable steps to ensure the personal information collected, used and disclosed is accurate, commensurate with the likely increased level of risk in an AI context, including using high-quality datasets, undertaking appropriate testing and the appropriate use of disclaimers. Disclaimers should clearly communicate the limitations of accuracy, including whether the dataset only includes information up to a certain date, and should signal where careful consideration and additional safeguards are needed for high privacy risk uses, such as decisions with a legal or similarly significant effect on an individual’s rights.

Evidence: Dataset quality control and provenance assessment records; Accuracy testing plan and results, including factual outputs about individuals; Disclaimer text and screenshots of where it appears, including the data cut-off statement; List of high privacy risk uses and the additional safeguards applied

When using commercially available AI products — third-party model APIs, SaaS and freely available chatbots included — OAIC’s use guidance requires five things. First, privacy obligations apply to any personal information input into an AI system and to output data generated by AI where it contains personal information, so due diligence at selection must consider whether the product has been tested for the intended uses, how human oversight can be embedded, the privacy and security risks, and who will have access to the personal information input or generated. Second, update privacy policies and notifications with clear and transparent information about the entity’s use of AI, ensure public-facing AI tools such as chatbots are clearly identified as AI to external users, and establish policies and procedures for AI use. Third, using AI to generate or infer personal information, including images, is a collection under APP 3 and must be reasonably necessary for the entity’s functions or activities and done by lawful and fair means — inferred, incorrect or artificially generated information produced by AI models, including hallucinations and deepfakes, is personal information where it is about an identified or reasonably identifiable individual. Fourth, where personal information is input into an AI system, APP 6 permits use only for the primary purpose of collection unless there is consent or the secondary use is within the individual’s reasonable expectations and related — directly related for sensitive information — to the primary purpose. Fifth, as best practice OAIC recommends that organisations do not enter personal information, and particularly sensitive information, into publicly available generative AI tools. This dovetails with the APP 1.7 automated-decision disclosure duty applying from 10 December 2026: general AI transparency first, then the statutory disclosure item for automated decisions.

Evidence: Privacy due diligence records for commercial AI vendors; Internal policy and training records on permitted uses and prohibited input data types; The AI-use paragraphs in the updated privacy policy; Approval records and logs for employee use of AI tools; Mapping to the APP 1.7 disclosure requirement and the update plan

Supplier and subcontractor ESG and security due diligence questionnaire (for use as the buyer)