Public Transport Victoria‘s head honcho has issued a very rare public lambasting of a pair of their ticket inspectors after anecdotal evidence from a commuter suggested they’d pressured a foreign student into opening her netbank app in front of them in order to access her details.
“I thought that was a little bit unusual, and I said to her, ‘You don’t have to tell him who you bank with,’ and he got a little bit pushy with me and said he wasn’t going to continue until I’d moved away.”
“The inspector was trying to talk to her about her bank account and he told me to move on, and said he wouldn’t continue until I left. I said that was fine, I could wait. There was a bit of a stand-off.”
“And then his colleague said that I wasn’t allowed to listen because of the Privacy Act. I’m also a lawyer as well as a teacher – the Privacy Act has no relevance to this.”
“She was really worried that she would lose her visa. She obviously thought she was dealing with the police and it was a really serious matter.”
Today, the unnamed inspectors were put on blast by PTV, with Weimer confirming that PTV had investigated the incident, and had told the AO’s involved that they were not permitted to “touch, use, or access people’s information.”
“Under no circumstances would an AO be taking somebody’s phone, holding somebody’s phone or trying to get into any of their applications or personal data.”
“I would never defend that.”
