Privacy Awareness Week (29 April – 5 May) is an annual event during which the Asia Pacific Privacy Authorities join forces to remind everyone to take steps to protect their own privacy and safeguard personal information about others that they might hold.

“Privacy is recognised in many countries, including Australia, as a human right,” says Privacy Commissioner Timothy Pilgrim. “Serious consequences can arise when someone’s privacy is breached and we all have responsibilities to look after the personal information we handle.”

ACCAN says today marks a major step forward in important reforms to make calls from mobile phones to 1800/13 numbers free or the cost of a local call, as they currently are from landlines.

The Australian Communications & Media Authority (ACMA) has today committed to amend the relevant regulation following further consultation and have industry implement the changes by January 2015.

ACCAN was honoured to receive the 2011 Organisation of the Year Award at the Australian Sign Language Interpreters’ Association (ASLIA) NSW & Deaf Australia (NSW) awards ceremony held in Sydney on Saturday April 21.

As an organisation ACCAN is committed to accessibility issues and we are fortunate to have two specialist disability policy advisers on our team. ACCAN is dedicated to ensuring interpreters and captioning are available at all our public events, that our website is WCAG 2.0AA compliant. We also make information available in Auslan, audio formats and Easy English wherever possible.

A record 76 groups and individuals applied for a total of $250,000 in funding in the 2012 round of the ACCAN Grants Scheme, which closed on April 2.

ACCAN Research and Grants Officer Robin McNaughton said this year’s applications were of a very high standard and a great mix of projects targeting a diverse range of consumer issues.

For communications consumers, the challenge of overcoming information overload to choose a new product and service is sometimes just too much. As one participant in the Seeking Straight Answers research puts it, "[I just want] someone to do the work, someone who knows what they're doing to find me the best deal...There's so many things you've gotta do that the inconvenience of doing all that outweighs any benefits you're going to get".