Data privacy and your responsibilities

Data privacy relates to how a piece of information or data should be safeguarded from unauthorised access, use and disclosure based on its confidentiality, integrity and availability needs.  

See Why information protection is important

UQ employees have data privacy responsibilities. These include:   

• You must access, share and store information appropriately. 

• Be aware of what constitutes Personally identifiable information (PII) and handle it responsibly.  Ensure that when you collect, manage and use PII you do so in accordance with the Privacy Management Policy. 

• Understand UQ’s Information Security Classification Procedure, and handle data as per its information security classification. Guidance is available via the ‘Procedures’ tab in the Information Management Policy.  

• Take due diligence to prevent data leaks (see Data breaches: how they occur and how to prevent them). 

• If you accidentally share information to an unintended recipient, or become aware of an actual or suspected data breach, alert  IT Support.   

‘Privacy by design’ is a process for embedding good privacy practices into the design specifications of technologies, business practices and physical infrastructures. This means building privacy into the design specifications and architecture of new systems and processes.  

It’s more effective and efficient to manage privacy risks proactively, rather than to retrospectively alter a product or service to address privacy issues that come to light. 

Staff must consider privacy during the initial design stages and throughout the development process of any new processes or services that involve the collection or use of PII. 

• Learn more at the Office of the Information Commissioner's Privacy by Design webpage.

• For advice, contact the Data Strategy and Governance Team.

You may also like to consider your data privacy at home. Below are some tips to help protect your personal data. 

• Know what you are sharing online. Guard your personal information such as your date of birth, telephone number and address.  

• Keep your work and personal presences separate.  Avoid using your UQ email address for non-UQ services. 

• Review your privacy settings on social media accounts, and increase as necessary.  

• Delete unused apps. Some apps require large amounts of storage, can introduce new vulnerabilities, and may slow things down. The fewer apps you have, the more secure your system and your information.  

• Update all devices and apps. Update all of the devices and apps you have and enable automatic updating whenever possible. Updates are important as they often include patches to security vulnerabilities. In addition, check that your antivirus subscription for your home devices is up to date. 

• Keep good password hygiene. Reusing passwords greatly increases the impact of a data breach, as should that system be breached, the cyber criminals can access multiple different accounts using the same account details.  

  • Find more information about passwords.

• Only enter data into legitimate websites or services. 

  • Find out what they will do with the information they are collecting, if it will be adequately secured and who it will be shared with. 
  • Enter the minimum amount of information required by the service to function.