Now, don't get me wrong - privacy is very important but as technology increases in complexity and it moves into every facet of our lives it is going to be increasingly harder to ensure that everything about your private life is kept that way.
Take the increasing number of security cameras being placed just about everywhere. At some stage in the not-too-distant future, automatic face recognition software is actually going to work with a high level of accuracy and you will be tracked from place to place by whoever has access to those cameras.
Right now, only the proper authorities have access to that information (or so they tell us) but even if they put in the cameras saying that they are for a particular use what's to stop the usage parameters being changed later? This has already happened in London where a system design to collect road usage fares is now being used to track cars - supposedely for conter-terrorism. Have no doubt - this will happen with just about everything.
Years ago it struck me that your credit card company knew an awful lot about you in terms of what you bought, when you bought it and where you bought it from. Also consider what your local supermarket knows about your purchasing habits.
Realise also that search engines are getting smarter - they are finding more and more data that is supposedely hidden (witness the many cases of using Google to find unprotected credit card numbers) - and many companies in the US are selling information they've collected to other agencies. You can already pay to do searches on people in the US - their privacy laws are reasonably crap.
Having said all that, I applaud the efforts of the Australian government in creating privacy laws. I have no doubt they will be unsuccessful in the long run. Even if the legislation says that information is to be kept private accidental release of such data (through, say, a badly coded web page) once digital data has been made public there is no way to reverse that situation.
So, what can you do? Not very much, really. You can fight it - do your best to ensure that your information is yours alone and for the next few years you might succeed. But in the long run, everything will become available. Hopefully you've got nothing to hide...
I could go on for ages. But you get the idea.