### Issue 2082 - Tuesday 7th May, 2024

## In Today's Issue

- Draft of revamped Privacy Act law coming in August
- Google lets Aussies remove personal info
- StackOverflow and OpenAI do a deal
- The Standards Australia's Reading Room is crap
- Cheap UE Boom 3 speaker, Steelcase chairs, Pixel 8 Pro

## The News

### Draft of revamped Privacy Act law coming in August

Strap yourselves in, the Attorney-General said they'll introduce a draft of the overhauled Privacy Act to Parliament in August. This whole process has taken years. The review the updated legislation will be largely based on began in 2020, was handed in back in 2022 and the government didn't respond to it until 2023, agreeing to only 38 of the 116 reforms. So much has changed in the world of online privacy since then, so it's really anyone's guess as to what will actually be in the draft bill.

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### Google lets Aussies remove personal info

It's Privacy Awareness Week and Google has released a "results about you" tool that allows people to "request the removal of results that contain personally identifiable information – such as phone numbers, emails or home addresses – via the Google app". There's also "alerts to find out if new results containing their personal information appear". Google's blog post about the new feature has information on how to get that personal info removed from their index.

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### StackOverflow and OpenAI do a deal

StackOverflow has done a deal with OpenAI that'll see OpenAI given access to StackOverflow's API and "feedback from the developer community to improve the performance of AI models" and StackOverflow gets "attribution — aka link to its contents — in ChatGPT". StackOverflow will also use "OpenAI’s large language models to expand its Overflow AI" to "add AI-powered natural language search to Stack Overflow". If I was a contributor to StackOverflow and saw this, I don't think I'd bother contributing anymore. All I'm doing is feeding an AI model for free. Why bother?

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## Something I Saw On The Internet

### The Standards Australia's Reading Room is crap

It's an absolute joke that all of the Australian Standards aren't free to access and share in a non-DRM encumbered method (seriously just dump all the PDFs on line via the National Library for fucks sake), but there is a way to view some of the more popular standards for free - the Standards Australia Reading Room. It's supposed to only be for non-commercial purposes, you only get two "access passes" per year, each access pass only lasts 24 hours and you can't copy & paste or print the standard. Better than nothing, but fucking barely.

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## Bargains

- Ultimate Ears UE BOOM 3 Bluetooth speaker - $110.96 on eBay
- 25%-30% off Steelcase office chairs & free delivery to VIC/NSW/ACT
- Google Pixel 8 Pro 128GB/256GB - $999/$1099 from Telstra

## Image Of The Day

Apple Media Image Disc August 1995 (Sketch the Cow / Internet Archive)

## The End

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