This appeared last week:
Australian government's data sharing principles far from agreed upon
Getting your consent before sharing your personal data between agencies is still "an area of debate", so why is the government planning to go ahead without consent?
"If we required consent, then data would only be shared where consent was given," writes the Australian government. So it plans to go ahead without your consent.
Yes, this is the "nuanced" position on consent in the Australian government's Data Sharing and Release discussion paper [PDF] that was released last week.
"While consent is important in certain situations, the societal outcomes of fair and unbiased government policy, research, and programs can outweigh the benefits of consent, provided privacy is protected," it asserts.
But the paper fails to justify that assertion.
It acknowledges that there were "robust discussions" about consent, and that consent "remains an area of debate and requires further public discussion". But the only support for the "can outweigh" assertion to remove the need for consent is vague hand-waving and a smattering of unlikely claims.
One example is the claim that the health research consent waiver in the Privacy Act 1988 was "accepted by the public" without consent being needed. Really? I challenge you to find an Australian who even knows it exists -- apart from medical researchers and privacy professionals, that is.
There's plenty of phrases like "unlocking potential", "better evidence base", "aspire to be a market leader", and "connected and seamless user experience", and all the other snake-oil squirtings we're all sick of.
But where is the evidence that spraying this data across the whole of government, like some magical fluid, will be a good thing?
As tech analyst Justin Warren noted in a blog post, much of the push for data-sharing without consent has come from university researchers.
"In my discussions in these meetings, there are some researchers who understand the privacy and consent issues, but they are a minority, sadly," Warren wrote.
"The researchers fervently believe they can improve public policy and programs by doing more research. Can someone point to research that supports this position? I mean, you've been doing research for decades, so surely there's lots of good, systemic evidence that more data and research improves things on a public policy front, yes?"
Vastly more here:
The article builds wonderfully on the excellent blog from Justin Warren.
If you go through all this you will be both well informed and alarmed as you were mostly on last weeks poll.
This is not an issue that will go away.
David.
Despairing about privacy isn’t an admission of defeat. It’s an acknowledgment that taking control of our data matters.
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