This appeared a few days ago:
Australian government cannot handle its own data securely, why give it yours?
Australia has performed an amazing act of self-leakage, selling a pair of locked filing cabinets of its own secret Cabinet documents.
It turns out the best way to get your hands on secret government documents in Australia is to head down to a furniture store and buy a locked cabinet or two full of them.
This sounds like the plot of a bad sitcom, but thanks to the reporting of Australia's ABC, we know it is the truth.
The gravity of this scenario cannot be overstated. These are some of the most secret documents that the Australian government creates, usually locked up for 20 years before being released to the public due to their sensitively and to put a bit of time between the actors and their actions, yet here they were, up for sale in suburban Canberra.
Scores of questions will be asked about how the cabinet in question came to make its way out of the governmental depths into the light of day, and deservedly so. It is worth keeping in mind that it comes at a time when Canberra is going through yet another round of national security legislation, where the latest thought bubble is to criminalise the holding of secret documents.
If this sounds familiar, it is. The government has form in wanting to criminalise the exposition of its stupidity, and it takes the shape of an amendment to the Privacy Act that would forbid the re-identification of de-identified datasets that are collected and published by the Commonwealth.
Going further, the proposed Privacy Act amendments also toy with the fundamental approach of the legal system, and move the onus of proof from the prosecution to the defendant, such that the defendant must prove that one of the exemptions in the legislation that allow re-identification work -- such as being contracted by the Commonwealth for such work, or being employed by a university or other state government body -- apply to them.
Somewhere in Canberra, some poor sod reckons that if they criminalise something, it doesn't happen, and it comes during a period when the government is generating and keeping more data on citizens than ever.
Lots more here:
As the Government runs around tightening the laws that govern us in reality they are clearly inept and incompetent.
I strongly advise you give them no data you would not be happy to see on the front page of the major national newspaper of your choice. Be really careful what you give them as it can be very hard to get back! Your health information is to be shared with your doctor and your family - not with the Government - who will leak it!
David.
1 comment:
And maybe GPs might want to have a think about this:
Measuring Overuse With Electronic Health Records Data
http://www.ajmc.com/journals/issue/2018/2018-vol24-n1/measuring-overuse-with-electronic-health-records-data
Conclusions: The use of EHR data, both extracted and manually abstracted, provides an opportunity to more accurately and reliably identify overuse of low-value healthcare services.
Not that I'm supporting overuse, but it's potentially another reason why the government is so keen to get its hands on as much health data as it can.
Post a Comment