New Ways to Reinforce Consumer Trust in Australia's Consumer Data Right

While Australia’s Consumer Data Right (‘CDR’) legal framework has been hailed as ‘the biggest reform to consumer law in a generation’, there is no accepted measure or benchmark against which its efficiency can be evaluated. This article builds on the analysis performed by the author in the companion article published in the same issue and argues that the concept of ‘consumer trust’ can be used as a signpost of the CDR’s success. It establishes consumer trust as a key enabler of social change envisaged by the CDR, performs a retrospective analysis of the factors which inhibit consumer trust in the current CDR framework and proposes legal reforms that should help overcome them. This article argues that some of the underlying challenges can only be more effectively addressed via economy-wide legal reforms, including an introduction of prescribed data transmission channels for transfers of valuable data (except between individual consumers). It is hoped the proposals formulated in this article will inform future reform directions for the CDR and consumer policy more generally.