The Government Seems To Have A Bit Of A Blind Spot As Far As Citizen’s Privacy Is Concerned.

This came to my attention last week:

Balancing the ledger: accounting for the year in privacy

June 28, 2017, Anna Johnston

This Friday it will be the end-of-financial-year here in Australia, which means it’s time for a stock-take: see where we are at, count the positives and negatives, and determine our net position.  Are we in the red or the black?

So today, rather than reconcile the Salinger Privacy petty cash receipts, I thought I would do a stock-take of the year in privacy, reviewing both positives and negatives.

Herewith I present to you the Privacy Ledger for the Australian Government, FY 2016-17.

First, the privacy-positive side of the ledger:

• A data breach notification law was finally passed.
• The government backed down on a Bill that would have allowed more sharing of veterans’ personal information without their consent.
• The government also backed down on the proposal to allow access to telco metadata for use in civil litigation (although, as the Attorney-General’s Department notes, “Civil litigants will still be able to access data that is not retained solely for purposes of the data retention scheme”).
• The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet agreed to develop a code with the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) to address concerns about data-handling in the Australian Public Service.

But then there’s also the privacy-negative side of the ledger:

• The fiasco that was #Censusfail, when the census was taken offline for several days in response to a minor and utterly predictable DDoS incident, with the result likely impacting on the quality of census data … the response to which was for the government to accept every one of the recommendations made by the PM’s Cybersecurity Special Advisor Alistair MacGibbon, including a Cyber Bootcamp for Ministers and senior public servants (but has that actually happened yet?), and an angry promise from the PM that “heads will roll”.  (Though I had assumed he meant heads at the ABS or IBM, rather than an academic who criticised the census in tweets using some salty language.)
• Even before the Census website debacle, privacy concerns were being raised about the ABS’s proposal for Census data-matching, including by yours truly, former Chief Statisticians, several boycotting Senators, and lawyers questioning even its legality, the government response to which was … oh, to entirely reject the proposed additional privacy safeguards, but promise to communicate better in the future.  (Sigh.  Let me just beat my head against a brick wall.)
• Then the publicly-available ‘anonymised’ MBS/PBS dataset was re-identified by cryptographic academics.
• The government tried to deal with the MBS/PBS re-identification problem not with prevention or education but with a massive stick: a Bill that if passed would retrospectively criminalise the re-identification of government-released data.
• The Australian Public Service Commission’s dataset on 96,000 public servants was then swiftly also pulled offline after yet more re-identification risks were found.
• The human services disaster-zone known as ‘robodebt’ hit the news, with stories of its victims raising significant concerns about the very real human cost of automated data-matching programs, designed and conducted by Centrelink without due regard to data quality.
• The public persecution of clients who complained about Centrelink, by releasing their personal information to the media, including the despicable treatment of blogger Andie Fox which made me even more furious than I was about the Census.  Instead of a quick and remorseful apology we got heel-digging and a rubbish argument from the Minister that the disclosure was lawful.
• The Australian Human Rights Commission collected incredibly sensitive information from rape survivors for a research project without ethical approval.
• Parliamentary Services were the cause of an embarrassing data breach, due to the use of poor redaction techniques on records about politicians’ expenses.
• The commencement of the mandatory data retention scheme requiring telcos to store certain data about their customers for two years, and allow warrantless law enforcement access to that data (except if the customer is a journalist, in which case a warrant is needed).
• Followed quickly by the first admitted data breach by the AFP for accessing a journalist’s metadata without a warrant.
• There was no budget increase for OAIC despite the in-coming data breach notification laws.
• A budget measure introduced drug-testing of welfare recipients.  When it was pointed out to the Social Services Minister that the Privacy Act requires that the government must first gain informed consent from an individual to collect their health information, the Minister responded with a frankly bullshit argument that by ‘choosing’ to accept welfare payments, his clients are ‘consenting’ to the new drug-testing regime, because “It’s open to anyone to not accept the payments … and remain outside the (welfare) system”.  Right, because people choose to be poor and unemployed or under-employed.
• The explicit privacy promise made when the national shared electronic health record was first introduced – that it would be opt-in – was overturned with the budget confirming the shift to opt-out, meaning the default position will soon be the creation of a shared health record for every Australian unless you opt-out (but note that if you opt out after a certain period, your record won’t actually be deleted).
• The government announced $131M over three years for a new data-sharing and data analytics unit within PM&C, to “connect all the separate datasets from across the public service … to build longitudinal data about populations, businesses, the environment and government. The data will be de-identified and opened up to third parties” – an announcement made while the Government was still preparing its response to the Productivity Commission’s report into how to improve data-sharing.
• The secretariat for the Senate standing committee for foreign affairs, defence and trade, mistakenly emailed a transcript of an SAS officer’s secret ‘in camera’ evidence to every witness that appeared before the committee’s inquiry, which was examining the military’s use of resistance to interrogation training.

It’s not exactly a well-balanced ledger, is it?

This litany of privacy disasters, solely from the Australian Government and just in the past 12 months, simply doesn’t square with the rhetoric about government having or obtaining the social licence necessary for more data-sharing and data analytics.

Read on here for a thoughtful discussion of what this all means.

https://www.salingerprivacy.com.au/2017/06/28/privacy-ledger/

Jinx, when all the stories from the last year are brought together they would seem to rather show a pattern of rather callous disregard of the right of citizens to have their personal data properly protected and for the Government to err on the side of caution rather than being quite so cavalier with how our data is used.

As I have remarked previously this list makes a very strong case for keeping any sensitive personal information well away from the Government and the myHR! The news from a few hours ago on the Medicare Card leak is all you need to know!

David.