Hey Australian Government. You know what also protects confidentiality of customer data? Encryption.
It's a hard problem. Encryption is part of the solution, but it's not the solution.
Mandatory metadata is already retained for 2 years at the consumers expense, no one has ever released how much or what is actually kept as all freedom of information requests by journalists have been denied. It's estimated that every adult generates around 15000 data points a day, it's known that mobile phone signal strength is kept allowing triangulation within 100m or so of every citizen every few minutes.
Last year alone there was over 300,000 warrantless requests made by 60 government agencies, many more are legally allowed to make requests, right down to small local councils in the middle of nowhere with 15 staff members and obscure agencies such as horse racing officials.
There's absolutely no oversight, I'm stuggling to imagine how many people it would actually take to investigate around 1000 requests a day, every day of the week.
It's only a matter of time before some serious abuse of the system occurs.
I think it's inevident that the more precise geolocation data of 5G (due to an increased base station installations required by the mmWave frequencies) will be sold to advertisers. Essentially, Australia is betting that European manufacturers will respect privacy better than China - and sure, at least European companies do not need to hand over their data to authorities. Having seen surveillance implementations installed in Chinese IoT devices, it is more or less true that China is at least keeping the doors open for an intertwined database where information from various different Chinese companies can be built.
"The iron laws of arithmetic confirmed my leadership," (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-45266718)
He, like all politicians, also seems to believe in cakes they can both have and eat.
But really this decision was made in a snap by Scott Morrison in a powerplay to look tough on outsiders to the conservative base.
Right now Australia is doing it's 2.5 yearly cycle of deposing a prime minister and installing someone else. Like that Dutton guy from texas :P
They're drafting a law that's going to require encryption backdoors. They're completely ignorant about the impossibility of having "secure backdoors", going as far as the Prime Minister saying:
> The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia.