APP 1.7: your privacy policy now needs a register you don't have

On 10 December 2026 a new paragraph becomes compulsory in the privacy policy of every organisation covered by the Australian Privacy Act. If a computer program makes, or does something substantially and directly related to making, a decision that could significantly affect someone, your policy has to say so.

I spent the last week reading the amending Act, the OAIC’s final guidance from 30 September, and every law firm summary I could find. They agree on the first step. What none of them dwell on is what that step looks like once AI agents are in the picture. Writing the paragraph is the easy part. Knowing what to put in it is where most organisations are going to struggle.

This is general information about a new legal obligation, written by an engineer. It is no substitute for legal advice about your own situation.

What changes on 10 December

The obligation is APP 1.7 to 1.9, inserted by the Privacy and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2024. It applies when three things are true. You have “arranged for a computer program to make, or do a thing that is substantially and directly related to making, a decision”. The decision “could reasonably be expected to significantly affect the rights or interests of an individual”. And personal information about that person is used along the way.

When all three hold, the policy must list the kinds of personal information those programs use, the kinds of decisions they make on their own, and the kinds of decisions where they do something substantially and directly related to making them.

There is no grandfather clause. The transitional rule covers decisions made after commencement whether the program was set up before or after. An agent you deployed in 2025 counts the first time it touches a relevant decision in December.

A breach of APP 1.7 is listed in section 13K, which makes it a civil penalty provision with a maximum of 200 penalty units per contravention, and opens the door to infringement and compliance notices. The OAIC has already shown it will read privacy policies. Its first compliance sweep of privacy policies started in January this year, covering around 60 entities.

Human review does not take you out of scope

This is the part of the guidance I expect to surprise people. The OAIC says a decision can be in scope “even where a computer program output does not replace the entire decision-making process or is subject to human review”. It names generative AI and chatbots as computer programs. Its examples include hiring screens, credit and insurance checks, fraud flags that block access to an account, refunds, and a case system that escalates certain complaints.

A human step can take something out of scope, but only a real one. In the OAIC’s worked example about AI-drafted pay decisions, what moves the output outside “substantially” is a manager who interrogates it, checks the evidence, and documents why they departed from the recommendation. A person who clicks approve on every draft does not count.

So “a human signs off” is a claim you may need to back up. That means a record of what the human did.

Your policy is a summary of a list

Here is the reframe that made this click for me. APP 1.8 asks for kinds. The OAIC lets you group decisions and categories of information, as long as the result is meaningful to a reasonable person. Its own model wording reads like a short catalogue: grant or deny access to an account, grant or deny a transaction, grant or deny a loan application.

You can only write those sentences honestly if you have the list underneath them: which program or agent, which personal information, which decision, whether a person genuinely decides, and who owns it. Your privacy policy is now a summary of a register. Most organisations don’t have the register.

The evidence that this is hard comes from people who were already obliged to publish. In October 2025 the OAIC reviewed 23 Commonwealth agencies that are authorised by law to use automated decisions. Four of them disclosed that use. For 17, the OAIC could not tell from public information whether automation was used at all. These are agencies with a statutory basis for automation and an existing duty to publish. If they struggle to say what they automate, a company with a dozen agents and three SaaS vendors shipping AI features every quarter will too.

The public expectation is moving the other way. The OAIC’s 2026 community attitudes survey found 79 per cent of Australians want to be told when AI is used, and 81 per cent want a person to review AI decisions.

Why agents make the list move

Every firm I read says to audit first. Hamilton Locke goes further and warns that “a ‘set and forget’ approach will not support ongoing compliance”. The Law Council’s submission names the routes automation arrives by without anyone deciding it should: embedded in software bought for something else, “introduced through a vendor update”, or “used informally by staff”.

Agents add their own churn. A support agent that only drafted replies gets a refund tool. A sales agent starts reading credit data because someone connected a new integration. Nothing about the privacy policy changed on either day, and both may have created a new kind of decision.

That is the useful distinction. The register changes often. The policy only needs to change when a new kind of decision or a new kind of personal information appears, or when the human step that kept something out of scope stops happening. Keeping the register current is what tells you when that moment has come.

A register you can start this week

None of this needs a new product. A spreadsheet will do for a first pass.

1. List every agent, model integration and vendor feature that touches personal information. Include staff using their own AI accounts for recurring work, which one submission to the OAIC calls arranged for “in substance”.
2. For each one, write down the decision it makes or feeds, in plain words: approves a refund, ranks applicants, flags an account.
3. Apply the three limbs. Is it substantially and directly related to the decision? Could the decision significantly affect someone? Is their personal information used? Where you are unsure, the OAIC’s advice is to take a cautious approach and disclose.
4. Record whether a person genuinely decides, and where the evidence of that lives.
5. Name an owner and add a “last changed” date.
6. Group the in-scope rows into kinds. Those groups are your draft APP 1.8 paragraph. Take it to whoever gives you legal advice.
7. Set a trigger. Any new agent, new tool grant or vendor AI feature gets a row before it goes live.

If you already think about agents as identities with their own access, as I argued in identity is the control plane for AI agents, most of the first column already exists somewhere. Step 4 connects to least agency: the decisions that need a person are the ones that should not run unattended.

Where the record comes from

The register is a document, and documents drift. What keeps it honest is a record of what agents actually did, so you can check the register against reality instead of memory.

That is the shape I have been building towards. When every agent action goes through one layer, each call is recorded with which agent made it, which system and data it touched, and whether a person approved it. That record doesn’t decide whether something is in scope for APP 1.7. It does tell you, at the end of each month, which agents touched personal information and in which decisions, which is the hardest column of the register to fill from memory.

If you want to see how that record is built, the security page walks through it.

Sources

• Privacy and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2024 (Cth), Schedule 1 items 87 to 89 and section 2: legislation.gov.au
• OAIC, APP Guidelines Chapter 1, updated 30 September 2026: oaic.gov.au
• OAIC, APP 1.7 to 1.9 transparency obligation fact sheet, September 2026: oaic.gov.au
• OAIC, review of automated decision-making disclosure by government agencies, 21 January 2026: oaic.gov.au
• OAIC, privacy policy compliance sweep, 9 December 2025: oaic.gov.au
• OAIC, Australian Community Attitudes to Privacy Survey 2026, digital technologies: oaic.gov.au
• Hamilton Locke, transparency in automated decision-making, 4 June 2026: hamiltonlocke.com.au
• Law Council of Australia, submission on the ADM issues paper, 3 July 2026: lawcouncil.au
• Digital Economy Council of Australia, submission to the OAIC, 22 June 2026: deca.org.au