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This weekly blog is to explore the news around the larger issues around Digital Health, data security, data privacy, AI / ML. technology, social media and related matters.
I will also try to highlight ADHA Propaganda when I come upon it.
Just so we keep count, the latest Notes from the ADHA Board were dated 6 December, 2018 and we have seen none since!
It is worth pointing out that it was only in last little while ( beginning end July 2020 ) the ADHA took down the notification regarding the most recent minutes notification. Embarrassed I guess – as they should be! I wonder will the new CEO make a difference?
The new CEO has been in place 5+ weeks – no new minutes obvious yet, or any other major improvements!
Note: Appearance here is not to suggest I see any credibility or value in what follows. I will leave it to the reader to decide what is worthwhile and what is not! The point is to let people know what is being said / published that I have come upon.
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Telegram battles to vet extremists flocking to its encrypted platform
By Tom Ravlic
November 1, 2020 — 12.00am
Administrators of the encrypted messaging platform Telegram have banned 1338 Jihadist-related bots or accounts in the past three days, after the terrorist attack in the French city of Nice again put a spotlight on Islamic extremism.
There is no evidence at this stage the Nice attacker used Telegram, but the app has become home to various forms of extremism in recent years, including the far-right, as an alternative to platforms such as Facebook.
Telegram allows users to create a hiding spot for videos, digital versions of texts and photographs that can be either public or private. The app is also used by drug traffickers, arms dealers and conspiracy theorists, and was a preferred communication platform for organisers of recent protests against Victoria's pandemic lockdown.
Launched by Pavel and Nikolai Durov in 2013 and based in Dubai, Telegram has a public channel called ISIS Watch that notes the number of jihadist-related accounts it removes each day; 17,036 in total between October 1 and 29, and 275,054 for the calendar year.
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https://premium.goauto.com.au/no-more-lockdowns/
No more lockdowns
A ‘military solution’ is needed now to ensure we never need to close down our economy again
By John Mellor on 30th October 2020 Comment, Free Access Articles, Regulations COVID-19
BY ANY standards, Australia took a severe direct economic hit from COVID-19 although by world standards we have managed to keep the deaths and infections relatively low.
At this time we seem to have things pretty much under control compared to countries like the United States where infection rates are blowing out towards 70,000 new cases a day and France where infection rates are surging past 30,000 new cases a day. Worldwide we have passed 40 million infections.
But, even in Australia, the cost of protecting lives and livelihoods with government assistance will be a massive price to pay and the true cost in lost employment and lost businesses as well as the erosion of family wealth and loss of savings will not really emerge until next year.
We will never know the true cost of lockdowns. Key industries like tourism and hospitality have been decimated. The car retailing industry will be set back years before it can recover the lost business of 2020.
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Privacy Act review to examine privacy tort, direct action rights, and GDPR compliance
The Attorney-General's Department will look at carve-outs, harmonisation with states and other nations, and a right to erase for Australians.
By Chris Duckett | October 30, 2020 -- 06:19 GMT (17:19 AEDT) | Topic: Security
Australia's Attorney-General Christian Porter announced on Friday the terms of reference and issues paper that his department will use as a basis for its review of the Privacy Act.
The wide-ranging review will consider the definition of personal information; whether existing exemptions for small businesses, political parties, and the storing of employee records to comply with the Act should remain; whether individuals should gain the power to drag privacy violators to court; and whether a privacy tort should be created.
The review was agreed to as part of the Commonwealth's response to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's (ACCC) Digital Platforms Inquiry.
In posing 67 questions for submissions to respond to, the Attorney-General's Department (AGD) has asked whether the definition of personal information should be extended to inferred personal information as well as whether additional protections should be extended to de-identified, anonymised, and pseudonymised information.
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Peter Dutton right on abuse, says US body for exploited children
The US organisation that refers online child sexual abuse material to global investigators is warning of an impending “massive” drop in the detection of abuse as Facebook and other tech giants push ahead with end-to-end encryption.
National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children vice-president John Shehan said that, as tech companies increased encryption in response to privacy and security concerns, the abuse of children would be undetected.
The NCMEC’s CyberTipline received 16.9 million reports of online child exploitation last year, and used information about upload locations to forward reports to the world’s law-enforcement agencies.
The organisation estimates more than half its CyberTipline reports will vanish with end-to-end encryption, a figure that law-enforcement sources say is highly conservative.
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My Health Record usage surges in FY20
By Dylan Bushell-Embling
Friday, 30 October, 2020
Use of the My Health Record digital health system grew 300% among hospitals amid the summers’s natural disasters followed by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the Australian Digital Health Agency’s (ADHA) annual report.
Between July 2019 and June 2020, public hospitals uploaded 322,000 documents viewed by others — an increase of more than 300%. Hospitals also viewed 271,000 documents uploaded by others, an increase of nearly 300%.
Meanwhile, general practitioners uploaded 187,000 documents viewed by others — up 165% — and viewed 416,000 documents uploaded by others — an increase of more than 250%.
This led to a total increase in the number of health documents in the My Health Record system from 1.3 billion to 2.09 billion. Clinical documents uploaded by hospitals, pathologists or radiologists have risen from 23 million to 75 million, and medicine documents from pharmacies and GPs grew from 56 million to 143 million.
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https://itwire.com/open-sauce/fancy-some-contact-tracing-that-ll-be-$4-12-million-a-pop.html
Author's Opinion
The views in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of iTWire.
Friday, 30 October 2020 11:10
Fancy some contact tracing? That'll be $4.12 million a pop
It's beginning to look like the Federal Government should avoid anything to do with technology following the revelation on Thursday that $70 million of taxpayers' money was spent on the COVIDSafe app – and only 17 cases were detected through its use.
That works out to approximately $4.12 million for each detection – though it may not be exact as my arithmetic is a little rusty.
But this is much better than when I inquired of every health department in the country in July — very few responded to my queries — about how many cases had been tracked through the app.
The one department which was polite enough to respond, the Queensland Department of Health, said not a single COVID-19 positive individual had been identified as a COVIDSafe user in the state.
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Almost $700 million in robo-debt claims repaid by federal government
By Rachel Clun
October 29, 2020 — 6.26pm
Almost $700 million in wrongly-reclaimed government 'robo-debt' payments has been returned to hundreds of thousands of people, including the estates of thousands of dead Australians.
Deputy chief executive of Services Australia Michelle Lees told a Senate estimates committee on Thursday that 402,000 people have either received a refund or had their debt reduced to zero.
In May, Minister for Government Services Stuart Robert announced the government would repay $721 million to Australians who received debt notices for alleged overpayments of their welfare based on flawed calculations.
To October 26, the government has repaid $697.1 million, Ms Lees said, which made up 94 per cent of all refunds.
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https://ajp.com.au/news/vulnerable-people-who-distrust-digital/
Vulnerable people who distrust digital
People who are likely to experience discrimination are the most likely to distrust digital health services – and one pharmacist says they may be “pull back” on electronic prescriptions
A new national study from the University of NSW shows that people affected by blood-borne viruses (BBVs) and sexually transmissible infections have lower trust in the move to digital health.
The Understanding trust in digital health among communities affected by BBVs and STIs in Australia, included survey results from more than 2000 people from around Australia, including 600 people classified as members of one or more populations affected by BBVs and STIs.
People with HIV, trans and gender diverse people, sex workers, and gay and bisexual men reported the lowest levels of trust in digital health care services, such as My Health Record, and the most frequent experiences of stigma.
While these groups reported better knowledge of My Health Record than the general population, they were much more likely to report opting out.
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https://www.ausdoc.com.au/news/youll-never-guess-what-patients-are-during-telehealth
You'll never guess what patients are up to during telehealth
Men find it harder to focus on the appointment at hand than women, a US survey shows
29th October 2020
Smoking, eating, texting, tweeting, and even sipping on a 'quarantini' are just some of the ways patients multitask during telehealth consults, US findings show.
Men are the worst offenders, with a survey revealing three quarters report engaging in other activities when on a telehealth call with their doctor.
Women are more likely to give doctors their undivided attention, with only 39% admitting being distracted during a telehealth consult.
According to the survey of 1000 US adults these are the most common distractions during telehealth:
- Surfing the web, checking emails, texting (24.5% of patients).
- Watching the news, TV, or a movie (24%).
- Scrolling through social media (21%).
- Eating a snack or a meal (21%).
- Playing a video game (19%).
- Exercising (18%).
- Smoking a cigarette (11%).
- Driving a car (10%).
- Having a 'quarantini' cocktail or other alcoholic beverage (9.4%).
They also 'fessed up to how they’re dressing for the appointments, with 14% in their pyjamas during a telehealth call.
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Twitter, Facebook, Google grilled in fiery US Senate hearing
Should Facebook, Google and Twitter take action in Australia against “Mediscare” style campaigns at election time? What about Clive Palmer’s claims of Labor planning to introduce a death tax?
Those types of issues in a bigger US context were the subject of a grilling of the CEOs of Facebook, Alphabet and Twitter by a US select committee examining their policies to remove or flag content posted during the US election campaign. At times the interchanges were hostile.
Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act lets the tech giants remove material considered to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing or otherwise objectionable. The law shields them from liability under the US First Amendment protecting free speech.
The fact the hearing took place within a week of the US election means it is seen as partisan by the Democrats, with one Senator branding it “a sham”.
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Intelligence committee urges government to close metadata 'loophole'
October 28, 2020 — 7.27pm
Councils and small government agencies would no longer be able to use a loophole to access Australians' private metadata under a significant overhaul of the country's data retention regime being urged by the federal parliament's intelligence and security committee.
A long-running review into the data retention laws has also recommended the threshold for accessing the data be lifted to a "serious offence".
The metadata laws were passed in 2015.
At least 87 agencies - including councils, the Victorian Institute of Education, the RSPCA and the South Australian fisheries department - were using a "loophole" in the Telecommunications Act to access people's metadata while investigating minor legal breaches.
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https://www.ausdoc.com.au/news/10-facts-rising-use-my-health-record
10 facts on the rising use of My Health Record
Coronavirus has given the system a big push, with most records now populated with data
28th October 2020 Uncritical Journalist Propaganda
GP uptake of My Health Record has jumped during the past year, thanks in part to the bushfire crisis and COVID-19 pandemic, the Australian Digital Health Agency says.
The agency has just released its annual report for the 2019/20 financial year, which shows GPs and hospitals are increasingly sharing patient information through My Health Record.
Here are 10 key findings:
- The number of GPs registered for My Health Record increased to 95%, up from 85% the previous year. Nearly all pharmacies (99%) and 95% of public hospitals are now on board.
- Some 187,000 documents were uploaded by GPs and viewed by others — a 165% increase on the previous year.
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Navigating My Health Record: Q&A panel for nurses working in the community
Details
Webinar ADHA Propaganda
Hosted by : Australian College of Nursing and Australian Digital Health Agency
Tuesday, November 24, 2020 - 18:30 to 19:30
Online
Sydney NSW 2000 Australia
The need for accessible patient medical information is more important than ever. Over two billion documents have been uploaded to the national My Health Record system and with ever increasing clinical content available, nursing staff may have rapid access to relevant and up to date information than ever before about their patients.
Join us for a panel discussion attended by representatives from the Australian College of Nursing, Australian Digital Health Agency and a nurse who has incorporated My Health Record into their daily workflow. There will be opportunity to ask questions throughout the session.
This education is CPD accredited and delivered in collaboration between the Australian College of Nursing and the Australian Digital Health Agency.
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How you can best utilise My Health Record in everyday practice – for community pharmacy
Details
Webinar ADHA Propaganda
Hosted by : Australian Digital Health Agency
Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - 18:30 to 19:30
Online
Sydney NSW 2000 Australia
My Health Record can be a valuable tool to assist with the effective and efficient delivery of care within your pharmacy.
This webinar is specifically tailored to community pharmacy staff wanting to learn more about how they can use clinical information available within My Health Record in everyday practice. This session will step through a range of situations and how the clinical information available may assist in care coordination and save time gathering information. All pharmacy staff are welcome to attend.
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Annual Report of the Australian Information Commissioner’s Activities in Relation to Digital Health 2019–20
Publication date: 2020
Part 1: Executive Summary
This report provides information about the OAIC’s digital health activities, including its assessment program, handling of My Health Record data breach notifications, development of guidance material, provision of advice, and liaison with key stakeholders.
This was the eighth year of operation of the My Health Record system and the tenth year of the Healthcare Identifiers Service (HI Service), a critical enabler for the My Health Record system and digital health generally.
The management of personal information is at the core of both the My Health Record system and the HI Service (which are collectively referred to as ‘digital health’ in this report). In recognition of the special sensitivity of health information, the My Health Records Act and the HI Act contain provisions that protect and restrict the collection, use and disclosure of personal information. The Australian Information Commissioner oversees compliance with those privacy provisions.
The My Health Record system commenced in 2012 as an opt-in system where an individual needed to register in order to get and share their My Health Record. In 2017, the Australian Government announced the creation of a My Health Record for every Australian. Following an opt-out period that ended on 31 January 2019, a My Health Record was created for every Australian who had not opted out of the system.
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https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=89ab9dd3-04f8-442c-9f93-365a82049929
ACCC releases Digital Platforms Services Inquiry Interim Report on Online Private Messaging
A brief catch-up: In December 2019, the Government announced that for the next five years the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) would monitor digital platform services, producing a report every 6 months (10 reports in total) following the ACCC’s recommendation in its Digital Platforms Inquiry.
The ACCC has embraced this role in its first Interim Report with an in-depth focus on online private messaging services, social media and online search. Many of the issues are not new, and as the ACCC recognises, updates and develops previous findings it reached regarding these industries. Of course, the digital landscape has seen accelerated growth and development in light of COVID-19, and there is a clear expression of awareness of this by the ACCC and a view to monitoring developments online throughout the pandemic.
The Interim Report reinforces the recommendations that the ACCC made in the Digital Platforms Inquiry (for more detail, see our summary of the recommendations ‘Digital reform unfolds - ACCC releases Final Report on Digital Platforms Inquiry’). In brief, these recommendations include:
- To address key consumer concerns in online private messaging: strengthening Privacy Act protections, establishing an enforceable code requiring platforms to be transparent with consumers about data sharing and consent, and providing opt-out-controls, and implementing dispute resolution mechanisms to address platform complaints and disputes.
- To address scam activity on platforms, and businesses being disadvantaged when dealing with digital platforms: establishing an ombudsman scheme to resolve these complaints and disputes.
- For small businesses facing unfair terms: prohibiting unfair contract terms and certain unfair trading practices.
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https://itwire.com/technology-regulation/acma-backs-telco-consumer-regulatory-reform.html
Wednesday, 28 October 2020 11:44
ACMA backs telco consumer regulatory reform
Australia’s telecommunications regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), is backing reform of current regulatory safeguards in the telecommunications sector.
The ACMA chair Nerida O’Loughlin says that with telecommunications now an essential service for Australian consumers and business, and with COVID-19 highlighting that more than ever, reliable communications are critical to consumers, businesses and government.
“The majority of Australians are satisfied with many aspects of their telco services. But, as an essential service, consumers now want to be satisfied with all aspects of that service. And they are not, consumers expect more,” she said.
O’Loughlin pointed to new ACMA research conducted in late 2019 showing telco consumers, particularly businesses, are still battling with service outages and complaints handling.
The research found that two-thirds of businesses had at least one issue or fault in the six months prior to the research - and of businesses that experienced a loss of Internet service or an outage, 42% reported the impact as major.
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https://wildhealth.net.au/how-the-digital-health-sector-has-responded-to-the-covid-19-pandemic/
How the Digital Health sector has responded to the COVID-19 pandemic
October 26, 2020 Sponsored
Australia’s health and aged care sectors have been fragmentally digitised for a number of years and, as a partner to some of the largest health and care providers, at Telstra Health we have seen a multitude of early adopters of digital systems.
In some states, the health and care systems have been digitised for many years, however these systems do not always work in sync with one another, and thus do not operate as efficiently as they could for the states they support.
For example, some components of the aged care system adopted digital systems more than a decade ago. In addition, some medical practitioners were trailblazers in adopting to digital solutions, whereas others tested out telehealth for the first time in recent months as a result of state-wide restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
At the height of the first wave of the pandemic, approximately 36 per cent of GP consultations were delivered by telehealth which amounted to around 4 million consultations per month. Furthermore, approximately 37 per cent of specialist consultations were delivered virtually during this time.
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https://dhin.net.au/five-minutes-with-mitchell-burger/
Five minutes with Mitchell Burger
This month we spent five minutes with Mitchell Burger, Director Strategy, Architecture, Innovation and Research, ICT Services, in Sydney Local Health District.
Please tell us a little bit about yourself.
Hello everyone! I am Director Strategy, Architecture, Innovation and Research,
ICT Services, in Sydney Local Health District. I find this an exciting and
challenging role, spanning a broad set of priorities. I am also doing a PhD at
the UNSW School of Population Health, focused on how to ensure the use of
artificial intelligence promotes population health equity, rather than
amplifying and entrenching inequalities. Before this I worked for the
Australian Digital Health Agency, on the National Digital Health Strategy, and
evaluation of the My Health Record system and Expansion (‘opt out’) program. I
have a background in statistics and data analysis, and completed a Masters in
Public Health, also at UNSW. On the weekends you’ll find me running around the
Inner West chasing my rascal kids, who are two and four.
How do you define digital health?
It won’t be a surprise to anyone to hear that I find it very hard to define! I
generally think about it as the use of digital technologies in the delivery of
health services, but it’s a term that means lots of things; like ‘big data’ or
‘artificial intelligence’. That we talk about ‘digital health’ (and before this ‘eHealth’, and
‘Health IT’ – see here for discussion of timeline) underscores that we’ve got
some way to go to where we need not draw a distinction. Certainly for
digital-native companies, digital is just how they do business; it’s not
remarkable. I think NSW’s new ‘Beyond
Digital’ strategy is good step in this direction – to where we
are all in the business
of providing health care together.
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ADHA Annual Report 2019-20
There seems to be no .pdf to browse.
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Facebook, Google are watching you, says ACCC
Digital platforms such as Facebook and Google are “extensively tracking” the online activities of Australians, the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission has warned.
The competition watchdog’s Digital Platform Services Inquiry interim report, released on Friday, says tech giants have also successfully increased their share of digital advertising despite sector-wide declines due to the COVID-19 crisis.
It says Facebook and Google continue to enjoy the majority of Australia’s digital advertising revenue, leaving just under 20 per cent for news and other websites.
It comes as the federal government moves to finalise legislation to force digital platforms to share their advertising revenue with media companies. “The ACCC notes that for a typical $100 spent by advertisers in 2018, $49 went to Google (including ad tech services), $24 to Facebook and $27 to all other websites and ad tech,” the report says. “This trend has continued in the 2019 calendar year, with $53 to Google, $28 to Facebook and $19 to all other websites and ad tech.”
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Tuesday, 27 October 2020 09:58
Digital identity apps in use forecast to exceed 6.2 billion in 2025
Digital identity apps in use will exceed 6.2 billion in 2025, up from 1 billion in 2020, according to a new study.
Juniper Research says its study also found that civic identity apps, where government-issued identities are held in an app, will account for almost 90% of digital identity apps installed globally in 2025.
The jump in use of the apps is driven by the increasing use of civic identity in emerging markets and the lasting impact of the pandemic, with Juniper saying that the “unprecedented shift to digital services during the pandemic across the world will stimulate rapid growth in civic identity”.
Research co-author Nick Maynard said: “Civic identity apps have come into their own as a way to boost digital financial participation, particularly in emerging economies.
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https://www.ausdoc.com.au/practice/how-coronavirus-contact-tracing-cheap-bit-uk
How coronavirus contact tracing on the cheap bit the UK
Public Health England used an outdated version of Excel and lost 16,000 sets of patient data
27th October 2020
An Excel spreadsheet may be excellent for tracking your personal finances or recording the office footy-tipping results, but would you trust it with the integrity of a national COVID-19 contact-tracing system?
Probably not. But this is reportedly what the UK did with disastrous results.
In October, the BBC reported that 16,000 people with COVID-19 had not been followed up for contact tracing over the course of a week.
The reason was that their details were being recorded in the old Excel file format, XLS.
For most of us using Excel on our home computers, the XLS file format was updated more than a decade ago. One key reason was because it could only handle 65,000 lines of data, rather than the one million lines of data of the newer file type.
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https://www.miragenews.com/big-jump-in-my-health-record-from-2019-to-2020/
October 26, 2020 6:09 pm AEDT
Big jump in My Health Record from 2019 to 2020
The challenges of 2020 with bushfires and the COVID-19 pandemic have demonstrated the need for accessible patient medical information at any time, and the Annual Report from the Australian Digital Health Agency shows that GPs and hospitals are increasingly sharing patient medical information by uploading and viewing documents in My Health Record.
Whether it was due to natural disaster or the COVID-19 lockdowns and closed state borders, many patients couldn’t see their healthcare provider face-to-face.
This is when My Health Record really shines and healthcare providers can access their patients’ important medical information such as test results, medications and hospital discharge summaries anywhere, anytime.
Independent Clinical Advisor to the Australian Digital Health Agency, Dr Steve Hambleton, said more and more healthcare workers were realising the practical benefits of digital health.
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Media release - Big jump in My Health Record from 2019 to 2020
26 October, 2020: The challenges of 2020 with bushfires and the COVID-19 pandemic have demonstrated the need for accessible patient medical information at any time, and the Annual Report from the Australian Digital Health Agency shows that GPs and hospitals are increasingly sharing patient medical information by uploading and viewing documents in My Health Record.
Whether it was due to natural disaster or the COVID-19 lockdowns and closed state borders, many patients couldn’t see their healthcare provider face-to-face.
This is when My Health Record really shines and healthcare providers can access their patients’ important medical information such as test results, medications and hospital discharge summaries anywhere, anytime.
Independent Clinical Advisor to the Australian Digital Health Agency, Dr Steve Hambleton, said more and more healthcare workers were realising the practical benefits of digital health.
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The COVIDSafe app is a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes
A censored university panel discussion illustrates how the COVIDSafe app came to be seen as another government tech-wreck.
Priya Dev
Oct 26, 2020 – 1.00pm
When I was removed from a university panel discussion about the COVIDSafe contact-tracing app, it brought to my mind the folktale The Emperor’s New Clothes, a story of profit and pride.
The story is of an emperor who is conned into purchasing an imaginary suit that only worthy people can see. Everyone maintains the illusion of the emperor’s suit because speaking the truth would reveal them to be fools.
The lie continues until a child exclaims that the emperor is wearing no clothes.
A similar myth is also being told about COVIDSafe – that it works.
In an analysis published by The Sydney Morning Herald in May, I argued that COVIDSafe is a digital placebo because it won’t work effectively on iPhones, rendering it useless to 50 per cent of us. After a link to the article was circulated among panel members, I was removed as moderator of an Australian National University panel discussing the app.
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https://www.migabulletin.com.au/casestudy/medication-goes-electronica/
Timothy Bowen Manager – Advocacy & Legal Services October 2020
The emergence of electronic prescribing and real-time prescription monitoring.
Can technology enhance your practice? It probably does already, whether through an electronic clinical records system, email and SMS, or easy access to electronic MIMS during consultation.
When it comes to medication prescribing and dispensing, technology has developed more slowly.
Your electronic record system might generate a prescription, but it is still a paper copy usually taken to a pharmacist to dispense. You can access your electronic records to see medications your practice colleague prescribed, but it is harder to find out who else may have prescribed medication to your patient, or whether they have filled the prescriptions given to them.
MIGA is conscious that technology is not the panacea for all the challenges you face in practice. Current systems often work well. New initiatives can bring unforeseen drawbacks. However, the right eHealth initiatives can bring very significant benefits to healthcare. That is why we’ve been advocating on these issues and other prescribing reforms with decision-makers and regulators to ensure they are clinician-led in development and deployment, and that their regulation and operation are sensible, practical and fair.
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https://www.innovationaus.com/privacy-office-faces-remarkable-drop-in-funding/
Privacy office faces ‘remarkable’ drop in funding
Denham Sadler
Senior Reporter
26 October 2020
The federal opposition has questioned a “remarkable” drop in support for the national privacy office in the coming years, with the organisation left waiting on whether government funding will be renewed or if it will face a near-50 per cent cut in resourcing.
The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) was provided $23.565 million in 2020-21 in this month’s federal budget, a slight decrease from the previous year.
There are concerns among privacy and civil rights advocates that the office is “severely underfunded”, despite an increased workload and an increasingly prominent role.
But the OAIC is also facing a potentially significant funding cut in the forward estimates. The budget outlined a small drop to $21.108 million in funding for the 2021-22 financial year, but a significant drop to $13.361 million the following year. This is set to remain stable in 2023-24 at $13.564 million.
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https://www.miragenews.com/six-steps-for-digital-self-defence-during-australian-cyber-week/
October 26, 2020 10:03 am AEDT
Six steps for digital self-defence during Australian Cyber Week
The Australian Digital Health Agency is promoting six practical steps for digital self-defence against attacks such as phishing and ransomware. These steps can protect your work and personal information.
- Build security awareness with the Digital Health Security Awareness eLearning course.
- Keep your software up to date
- Use strong passwords and implement multi-factor authentication
- Back up your data regularly
- Do not respond to unsolicited phishing emails, texts and calls
- If you fall victim to ransomware, avoid paying the ransom
Tony Kitzelmann, the Agency’s Chief Information Security Officer said “Like a scheduled health check-up, we encourage everyone to take time during Australian Cyber Week to review their online presence, to ensure the appropriateness of their published personal and professional information and check if it puts them at risk from a targeted cyber-attack.” 2020 has been a year where many people and organisations have relied on virtual interactions to keep in contact and to conduct business. While there are many benefits to this increased connectivity, cyber-criminals will take every opportunity to exploit any vulnerabilities to steal your data or funds.
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How to win with machine learning
· Harvard Business Review
The past decade has brought advances in an exciting dimension of artificial intelligence: machine learning. These developments have enabled tech giants such as Apple, Facebook and Google to dramatically improve their products. They have also spurred startups to launch new ones.
Many companies are already working with AI and are aware of the practical steps for integrating it into their operations. But how can they take advantage of machine learning to create a defensible moat around the business — something that competitors can’t easily imitate?
Businesses use machine learning to recognise patterns and then make predictions — about what will appeal to customers, improve operations or help make a product better. Before you can build a strategy around such predictions, however, you must understand the inputs necessary for the prediction process, the challenges involved in getting those inputs and the role of feedback in enabling make better predictions over time.
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https://itwire.com/open-sauce/sydney-morning-herald-shows-it-knows-nothing-about-encryption.html
Author's Opinion
The views in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of iTWire.
Monday, 26 October 2020 11:28
Sydney Morning Herald shows it knows nothing about encryption
One of Australia's main newspapers, the Sydney Morning Herald, believes that technology companies can open "very small" encryption backdoors to enable government agencies to snoop on encrypted communications.
These, the newspaper argued in an editorial on Thursday, would not "allow malign actors to snoop on private communications".
That this kind of incredible ignorance should be displayed by a media organisation of this size is simply amazing. The SMH and several other publications formerly owned by a company known as Fairfax Media, which is now no more, are now owned by Nine Entertainment.
[Full disclosure before I go any further: I worked for The Age, a sister publication of the SMH, for nearly 17 years beginning in 1999. I was the online technology editor for both publications from May 2002 till December 2005.]
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Apple and Google's web-controlling pact under threat in US lawsuit
By Daisuke Wakabayashi and Jack Nicas
October 26, 2020 — 8.36am
When Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai, the chief executives of Apple and Google, were photographed eating dinner together in 2017 at an upscale Vietnamese restaurant called Tamarine, the picture set off a tabloid-worthy frenzy about the relationship between the two most powerful companies in Silicon Valley.
As the two men sipped red wine at a window table inside the restaurant in Palo Alto, their companies were in tense negotiations to renew one of the most lucrative business deals in history: an agreement to feature Google's search engine as the preselected choice on Apple's iPhone and other devices. The updated deal was worth billions of dollars to both companies and cemented their status at the top of the tech industry's pecking order.
Now the partnership is in jeopardy. Last week the US Justice Department filed a landmark lawsuit against Google — the US government's biggest antitrust case in two decades — and homed in on the alliance as a prime example of what prosecutors say are the company's illegal tactics to protect its monopoly and choke off competition in web search.
The scrutiny of the pact, which was first inked 15 years ago and has rarely been discussed by either company, has highlighted the special relationship between Silicon Valley's two most valuable companies; an unlikely union of rivals that regulators say is unfairly preventing smaller companies from flourishing.
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https://apo.org.au/node/308984
A national digital inclusion roadmap
20 Oct 2020
Resources
A national digital inclusion roadmap 553.98 KB
Description
Australia is digitising, with the COVID-19 pandemic accelerating the pace of every-day activities moving online. It is becoming increasingly critical that all Australians are digitally included so they can participate in all aspects of society.
Being digitally included means:
- A person has affordable access to high-quality internet, and owns appropriate devices to utilise the internet.
- A person can use the internet in an accessible way, whether they are living with disability, from culturally or linguistically diverse backgrounds, or with other needs.
- A person has the ability, skills and confidence to complete tasks on and benefit from the internet.
In order for Australians to engage in basic online services such as MyGov, Centrelink and Medicare - as well as banking and telehealth - it is essential they have affordable and reliable internet and devices, can use the internet in a way that works for them and have the skills to complete tasks confidently and safely.
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Telehealth essential for keeping young people safe and engaged
Sue Barker
Francoise Ode-Berryman
Chris Sasse
Karen Spielman
YOUNG people, in particular, are doing it tough during this COVID-19 pandemic and they will be most affected in the months and years ahead. Even in normal times, there are barriers to their accessing care. Telehealth appears to allow easier health access for some young people and needs to remain available as an option for them.
Young people are in the midst of what Professor Patrick McGorry AO calls a “mental health shadow pandemic”. Health services are seeing increasing numbers of young people with depression, anxiety, substance use (here, here and here) and eating disorders (here and here). Stress related to inability to manage online learning, final high school examinations, loss of work, and to being locked down in a family with unhealthy relationships is skyrocketing. Those with pre-existing mental health problems are suffering exacerbations; others are experiencing symptoms for the first time. Social isolation has reduced ability to self-manage. Waiting times for help are increasing, while services are struggling beyond capacity.
Deady and colleagues have described the suicide risk of future widespread unemployment. Young people are faced with reduced end-of-school employment and career choices. Many have also lost the excitement normally due this time of life. The suicide rate for Australian youth is already high – it is the commonest cause of death for this age group. Modelling predicts that it will increase.
“In crisis periods, it can be the most disadvantaged groups that are disproportionately affected and marginalised and at-risk populations require specific attention,” wrote Deady and colleagues.
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Saturday, 24 October 2020 15:57
A VPN is fast becoming a commodity of the digital era, but the right VPN matters
Once used only by the military, corporations, and geeks, VPNs are effectively now a commodity for savvy online users, with the question for many no longer if you use a VPN, but which VPN you're using.
VPN. It stands for Virtual Private Network, and it's a service that encrypts your internet traffic and protects your privacy online. With a VPN, you can securely access apps, websites, and entertainment platforms from anywhere in the world.
As your traffic is encrypted, it can't be snooped upon by your ISP or a government. It hides your IP address, and allows you to appear to be located in other countries, letting you bypass restrictions that limit access to sites only by users in certain countries. It also lets those in countries where blocks are in place to access content that they wouldn't otherwise have access to.
A VPN encrypts your traffic on public Wi-Fi networks, making the use of public Wi-Fi safe from hackers who might otherwise be trying to harvest information that would otherwise be publicly transmitted over a public Wi-Fi connection.
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Sunday, 25 October 2020 06:37
ACCC report finds Google, Facebook increasing take of online ad spend
The first six-monthly interim report from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commissions Digital Platform Services inquiry shows that the share of online advertising spend of Google and Facebook is increasing, with $53 of every $100 going to Google and $28 to Facebook.
This has increased from $49 and $24 in 2018 for Google and Facebook respectively.
In another finding, the ACCC said for a retail product search on Google there was a bigger proportion of sponsored as the first result on mobile devices compared to desktop devices, including laptops.
"Organic search results were often less visible to consumers searching on a mobile device," the report said.
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Comments more than welcome!
David.
