Chennai transcribers heard audio from 93 Australian court cases; no action follows

01How court audio reached Chennai

VIQ Solutions Pty Ltd, the Australian subsidiary of Canada’s VIQ Solutions Inc, recorded and transcribed hearings for the Federal Court and the Federal Circuit and Family Court under a Commonwealth contract. The audio sat on servers in Australia. Its NetScribe platform cut each hearing into non-continuous snippets, so a transcriber hears pieces of many cases, and could not keep a copy. The Canadian parent had a contract with e24 for “global transcription services” and “inadvertently added” e24 staff to the Australian work pools. Five e24 employees in India had access until it was revoked on 11 February; three used it.²

VIQ told the regulator the snippets were 15 minutes long. On 3 November an independent review commissioned by the Federal Circuit and Family Court found they were in 5-minute increments. Two of the 93 matters were ceremonial sittings; in the rest, the OAIC says, it is likely that many snippets held personal information, depending on “whose voice is recorded and what is said”. Media reports had alleged that “large quantities of sensitive court documents were improperly disclosed to a foreign entity”; the OAIC found the incident “smaller in scale and more confined”.²

02A possible security breach, not a cross-border one, and no one left to pursue

Australian Privacy Principle 8 makes a company take reasonable steps before it discloses personal information to someone overseas. The OAIC found no disclosure: VIQ did not engage e24, and the audio “remained on VIQ’s servers in Australia and could not be downloaded”. It treated the case as unauthorised access, a question for APP 11, and called the root cause “an access-control error, rather than an ongoing practice.” The courts themselves are outside the Privacy Act for their judicial work, so the notifiable-breach scheme did not apply to them.²