Article originally published by Crystal Camara, Principal Consultant at Helios Salinger.
Australians aren’t ignoring privacy. They are exhausted by false choices. The ACAPS 2026 survey shows that the ‘I agree’ button is starting to look less like consent, and more like surrender.
Be honest. The last time a privacy policy appeared on your screen, all forty-odd scrolls of it, how long did you spend reading it? For many of us, the answer is: not very long. We scroll, select the ‘I agree’ button and continue with what we were trying to do in the first place. Tick and flick.
You are not alone, and your actions may not reflect how much you actually value privacy.
ACAPS 2026
The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner has released its 2026 Australian Community Attitudes to Privacy Survey (ACAPS), a nationally representative study of 1,504 Australians. There is plenty in it to keep privacy professionals occupied, however the finding that stopped me wasn’t a headline about data breaches or rogue AI, it was a quiet little contradiction buried in the middle of the report. It says something rather unflattering about the entire machinery of how we ‘agree’ to things online. The finding is that Australians routinely agree to privacy policies without reading them, even as they report deep concern about how their information is handled.
The numbers
Around 69% of Australians say they always or often agree to an organisation’s privacy policy without reading most or all of it. Cue the knowing chuckle. Of course we don’t read them. Nobody reads them. There’s a well-worn gag that the only human who has ever read a set of terms and conditions top to tail is the lawyer who drafted them – and even that’s not guaranteed.
The easy conclusion would be that Australians simply do not care enough about privacy. Case closed. Everyone’s apathetic. Except the survey demolishes that theory on the very next page, and the rest of the ACAPS findings point in a very different direction.
The contradiction
The same people selecting ‘I agree’ without reading the privacy policy are more anxious about privacy than ever, not less. Some 93% say protecting their personal information matters to them, and 87% say they are more concerned than they were five years ago. So, if Australians care this much, why does the behaviour appear to say the opposite?
