Data Recipient unavailability back-off pattern

Question

As per ACCC’s guideline on Data Recipient unavailability, data holders should follow either a long term back-off pattern or a short term back-off pattern if the ADR is not available. For the first two retries, wait time in the long-term scenario are 200 milliseconds and 400 milliseconds. These initial retry wait times may not be relevant from a real world perspective as the gap between consecutive retries is in milliseconds. Also, 7 days duration (as per long term pattern) is too long and 10 minutes (as per short term pattern) is too short for a live application recovery point of view.

Considering these above-mentioned points and to provide a better customer experience, can the retry mechanism (in the case that the ADR is unavailable) be implemented as a combination of both short-term and long-term back-off patterns?

For example, the data holder could start with a short-term pattern (once in every minute for 10 minute or until recovery) followed by an exponential pattern as below:

Number of retries	Wait time in minutes
1	20
2	40
3	80
4	160

The intent is that the above pattern would continue for three days.

Please let us know your feedback on this proposed approach.

Answer

The back-off patterns currently defined help data holders meet the intent of the rules but there is potential opportunity for improvement.

A standards-maintenance GitHub issue has been raised to track this work: https://github.com/ConsumerDataStandardsAustralia/standards-maintenance/issues/367 as the back-off pattern isn't the only mechanism which could be used to mitigate against consents losing synchronisation between participants.

In the interest of community collaboration, we would encourage stakeholders to discuss how the current model can be improved on this GitHub maintenance issue.