Category: Privacy

Pirate Party Australia supports moves by Australian Citizens to opt out of the Federal Government’s MyHealth Record System. Many flaws within the system have been exposed by the Australian media since the Opt Out period began on 16 July, 2018.

While Pirate Party Australia supports a national system of electronic health records in principle, the MyHealth Record systems fails to provide the basic privacy safeguards that should be enforced for such a system, combined with a mandatory Opt Out system rather than Australian Citizens being asked to opt in.

“The MyHealth Record system as it was initially rolled out looks like a lazy and poorly thought out IT project,” stated Pirate Party President Miles Whiticker. “This is a continuation of the Federal Coalition Government’s shocking record on IT infrastructure and privacy matters. It should only ever have been an Opt In system,” Miles continued, “and while we understand that the issue has since been rectified, that initially Australian Law Enforcement Agencies would not have required a warrant or court order to access the information held on MyHealth Record is concerning to Pirate Party Australia and should be to all privacy advocates.”

“Pirate Party Australia would encourage all Australian Citizens to opt out of MyHealth Record before the current 15 October 2018 deadline.”

How to opt-out of My Health Record, courtesy of the Australian Privacy Foundation:

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In an epic violation of trust, Minister for Human Services Alan Tudge has intentionally given out a Centrelink client’s personal information to Fairfax media, as a part of a political campaign to discredit and silence Australians speaking out against the nightmare of Centrelink’s debt recovery program[1]. The article, published by Fairfax media[2], contained personal information that was used to “correct the record”, but only serves to highlight the abuse of power within Federal Government departments who would rather be seen to silence criticism than fix the issue at hand.

“By releasing personal information to ‘correct the record’, Centrelink and federal government MPs and officials have set a dangerous precedent when it comes to handling the information of Australians” said Pirate Party Deputy President, Michael Keating. “This action shows the federal government’s intent with collection of personal data from multiple sources, and it’s not for national security reasons. Regardless of what the official line is, this appears to be nothing short of a department attempting to silence criticism in the bluntest way possible, despite there being legitimate issues in process and service delivery from this department. Silencing criticism does not resolve the problems, it only serves to amplify them.”

The release of personal data may be authorised by the Department of Human Services to “correct public statements”[3], but is an entirely disproportionate reaction. This comes from a government who at this time is seeking to link various data collected on individuals, from Census data, to metadata and phone records. The implications of a government department issuing personal data with little to no oversight and the intent of silencing an individual, is horribly irresponsible from a government who claims to be “adult”. We note that at this time, requests to ministers’ diary entries go unanswered[4], which highlights a running hypocrisy on transparency by the Federal Government.

“The point made by the release of this information is that if you speak out about your experience with a government department in a negative light, the government will happily blackmail you into silence.” Mr Keating continued. “This is nothing short of moral incompetence from a heartless government, who also has access to your metadata, call records, and Census information. We have no doubt government departments will access cross-linked data without a warrant or oversight in the future to ‘deal’ with people or problems. We are appalled and demand that the bureaucrats and ministers involved take responsibility for their actions; it’s what adults should do.”

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In August 2016, the Australian Bureau of Statistics attempted to run the 2016 Census. The Census was plagued by privacy issues and technical mishaps, in what is potentially Australia’s biggest privacy blunder of the year. For the first time since the Census began, the ABS had decided to not only take down your name and address, but also store these details and link them together with other data sets. The Pirate Party would love to explain which data sets now are intrinsically linked to your information, but it turns out that not even the ABS has the answer to this question.

On Thursday 24 November 2016, the Senate Economics References Committee delivered its report on the 2016 Census[1]. The report shows that the ABS ignored the results of a privacy assessment conducted by an external reviewer in 2005, an assessment which showed that retaining names and addresses had serious privacy implications. Instead, they decided to run their own internal privacy assessment in 2015, which surprisingly came to the complete opposite decision. The ABS then concluded on the basis of this self-run privacy assessment, along with a whole three submissions from the public (all of which expressed negative doubts about the retention of names), that retaining names was definitely a good idea.

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As millions of people simultaneously attempted to log in to complete their census forms last night, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) servers failed under the enormous traffic load. The ABS has blamed this on a hardware router failure, a false positive in a monitoring system, and external attackers who were allegedly attempting to overload the servers through a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack occurring at the same time. David Kalisch, head of the ABS, claimed that the servers were taken offline between 7:30 pm AEST, after which time the main social media accounts continued to advise people that there was no problem and to complete the Census forms until 10 pm.

“The public was advised prior to the Census that it would not be a target for attack. The claims made after the event call into question the competence of those who planned the Census, as well as the Minister responsible,” commented Simon Frew, Pirate Party President. “The ABS has already breached the public’s trust by admitting to retaining personal information and enabling the linking of external datasets. They have now made that worse by incompetently allowing the online data collection to fail.”

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