Consent: How much can the meaning of a word change in four months?

In May 2001 the Privacy Commissioner released a set of guidelines to assist the interpretation of the private sector amendments made to the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth), which came into force on the 21 December 2001. Among other things, those guidelines contained a detailed discussion on the meaning of the term ‘consent’.

In September 2001 a new set of guidelines were presented by the Privacy Commissioner, containing fewer — not to say a lack of — explanations in relation to the use of the ambiguous term ‘consent’.

This article aims to examinine the differences, in relation to the term ‘consent’, between the September guidelines and the ones released only four months earlier.