Privacy Crackdown And Surveillance Fears Roil 2026

In an era where personal privacy is increasingly under siege, two major developments—one in Australia and another in the United States—are putting the spotlight on how governments and private companies handle the sensitive data of millions. From sweeping regulatory crackdowns to fierce political debates over surveillance, the question of who controls personal information has rarely felt more urgent.

As of January 2026, Australia’s Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) launched its first-ever privacy compliance sweep, according to the OAIC’s recent media release. This unprecedented initiative targets approximately 60 businesses across sectors that routinely collect personal information in person. The industries under scrutiny include rental and property agencies, chemists and pharmacists, licensed venues, car rental companies, car dealerships, and pawnbrokers and second-hand dealers. The OAIC’s aim? To ensure these entities’ privacy policies comply with Australian Privacy Principle 1.4, which sets out strict rules for how organizations must inform individuals about their data collection practices.

For businesses found lacking, the consequences could be steep. Under the OAIC’s new enforcement powers, non-compliant organizations may receive compliance and infringement notices—potentially resulting in penalties of up to AUS$66,000. It’s a wake-up call for any business in these sectors to revisit their privacy policies and collection notices, making sure they’re not just up to date, but fully transparent about how customer information is handled.

This Australian push for robust privacy standards comes at a moment when, across the Pacific, the United States is embroiled in a heated debate over government surveillance and personal data protection. The Trump administration has ramped up efforts to consolidate personal data held across federal agencies, seeking to create what critics call a “surveillance dragnet across the country,” according to William Owen, communications director at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. Owen emphasizes, “We’re entering an increasingly dystopian era of high-tech surveillance.”

As part of its deportation strategy, the administration ordered states to provide personal data from voter rolls, driver’s license records, Medicaid, and food stamp programs. The goal: to assemble a single, comprehensive trove of information on people living in the United States. This move has sparked resistance not just from traditionally left-leaning states and cities, but also from a growing number of conservative lawmakers who are now wary of the expanding reach of surveillance technologies.

In 2025, conservative-led states such as Arkansas, Idaho, and Montana passed laws to protect data collected through automated license plate readers and similar surveillance tools. They joined at least five left-leaning states—Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, and Washington—that have blocked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from accessing their driver’s license records. Meanwhile, Democratic-led cities in Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Texas, and Washington terminated contracts with Flock Safety, the nation’s largest provider of license plate readers, highlighting a rare bipartisan concern over privacy.

Automated license plate readers, often perched atop police cars or streetlights, can record the plate numbers of every passing vehicle—sometimes storing this data for years. According to the International Association of Chiefs of Police, storage policies vary widely by agency, but the scale of the data collected is staggering. Flock Safety claims its cameras are now deployed in more than 5,000 communities and are connected to over 4,800 law enforcement agencies across 49 states, conducting more than 20 billion license plate reads every month.

The company maintains that it does not have a contractual relationship with ICE, even as critics, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), allege that local police often use Flock’s technology to conduct searches on ICE’s behalf. Audit logs from the Denver Police Department, for instance, show that more than 1,400 searches were conducted for ICE since June 2024. In Denver, the city council voted to terminate its contract with Flock Safety in the spring of 2025, but Democratic Mayor Mike Johnston unilaterally extended the contract in October, arguing that the technology is a vital crime-fighting tool.

Holly Beilin, a Flock Safety spokesperson, told reporters, “Agencies and cities are very much able to use this technology in a way that complies with their values. So they do not have to share data out of state.” She also pointed to the technology’s role in solving high-profile crimes, such as helping police identify the perpetrator in the Brown University shooting and the killing of an MIT professor at the end of last year.

Yet privacy advocates remain unconvinced. “The conversation has really gotten bigger because of the federal landscape and the focus, not only on immigrants and the functionality of ICE right now, but also on the side of really trying to reduce and or eliminate protections in regards to access to reproductive care and gender-affirming care,” said Anaya Robinson, public policy director at the ACLU of Colorado. Robinson warns, “When we erode rights and access for a particular community, it’s just a matter of time before that erosion starts to touch other communities.”

Adding to the patchwork of privacy protections, Montana recently enacted a law barring government entities from accessing electronic communications and related material without a warrant. Republican state Sen. Daniel Emrich, who authored the law, underscored its importance: “The most important thing that our entire justice system is based on is the principle against unlawful search and seizure”—a right guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Amid these legal battles and political divisions, ordinary people have taken to the streets. On January 8, 2026, protests erupted outside a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Portland, Oregon, with demonstrators voicing concerns about government surveillance and the collection of personal data. Similar scenes played out in cities across the country, from Los Angeles to Minneapolis, as Americans grapple with the real-world consequences of data-driven enforcement and the potential for abuse.

The debate over privacy and surveillance is anything but settled. In Australia, the OAIC’s compliance sweep signals a new era of proactive enforcement, with regulators holding businesses to account for how they handle personal data. In the U.S., the struggle is more fractured, with states and cities enacting their own protections even as federal agencies push for greater access to information. Both cases underscore a fundamental truth: as technology advances and data collection becomes more pervasive, the fight to protect individual privacy will only grow more complex—and more urgent.

For now, the world watches as lawmakers, regulators, companies, and citizens wrestle with the boundaries of privacy in the digital age, knowing that the outcome will shape not just policy, but the very nature of personal freedom in the years to come.