Building public trust and modernising oversight: OAIC's regulatory action priorities for 2025-26

Recently, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) released its regulatory action priorities for 2025–26, offering a clear view of where the agency will be directing its efforts and resources over the coming year. The 2025–26 regulatory action priorities reflect the OAIC’s focus on areas that require regulatory oversight to prevent privacy harm and uphold information access rights, ultimately aiming to increase public trust and confidence.

The areas of focus for 2025–2026 are as follows:

1. Rebalancing power and information asymmetries

The OAIC is concerned with sectors and technologies that erode individual control and create power and information imbalances. This includes instances where individuals don’t fully understand how their data is being used or where access to information is made harder than it should be.

This includes:

Rental and property, credit reporting, and data brokerage sectors, where personal information is often central to decision-making, but transparency and fairness are often lacking.

Advertising technology practices like pixel tracking, which allow for detailed user profiling.

Practices that erode information access and privacy rights in the application of artificial intelligence.

Agencies and organisations can expect that the OAIC will keep a close eye on the excessive collection and retention of personal information, while continuing to address and champion timely access to government information.

2. Rights preservation in new and emerging technologies

As technology evolves, the OAIC is committed to ensuring privacy and information rights aren’t left behind. This priority is focused on protecting and upholding privacy and information access rights when dealing with high-impact new and emerging technologies including:

Facial recognition and biometric scanning tools, noting that these technologies can be highly invasive if deployed without proper safeguards.

New surveillance technologies such as location data tracking in apps, cars and other devices, noting that these are technologies used by people every day.

There is also a focus on the preservation of privacy and information access rights, in the government’s use of artificial intelligence and automated decision-making. The emphasis here appears to be on ensuring that privacy and information access rights are protected, as technology changes the way decisions are made and data is collected.

3. Strengthening the information governance of the Australian Public Service

The OAIC will continue to strengthen information governance and integrity in the Australian Public Service by:

Highlighting areas where information handling practices are inadequate and data is not managed appropriately through its life cycle, including how requests for access under the Freedom of Information Act and Privacy Acts are managed.

Providing guidance to elevate administrative decision-making in the Australian Public Service.

Monitoring the use of messaging apps by government agencies.

Identifying government integrity risks arising from information management practices that impact on trust in government, including poor disclosure practices.

There’s a clear focus here on prevention, accountability, and lifting standards in the management of public information by the Australian Public Service throughout the information life cycle.

4. Ensuring timely access to government information

Finally, the OAIC is committed to supporting the timely release of government information in line with the objects of the Freedom of Information Act.  This involves progressing complaint investigations or monitoring activities and using data to highlight systemic underperformance by individual agencies.  The focus is particularly on agencies’ refusal rates, compliance with statutory timeframes, disclosure log practices and information publication scheme compliance.

Final Thoughts

These four regulatory action priorities reflect where the OAIC sees the greatest opportunity for impact and signals a strong and targeted approach to regulation.