Outgoing Chief Justice of the Australian High Court, Justice Murray Gleeson, has questioned the relevancy of privacy laws, given the apparently increasing willingness of people to discuss private matters on mobile phones in public, and divulge what was previous regarded as “personal information” on social networking websites.
“I used to think that having a telephone conversation was normally private. But you can’t walk down the street without hearing a number of telephone conversations, some of them with people speaking loudly because of the noise of the surrounding traffic … “When you look at the kind of information that people publish about themselves, it makes you wonder.” Justice Gleeson said.
