Australian welfare recipient’s data released to counter public criticism (opens in new tab)

I'm an Australian who lived a couple of years in the Bay Area. The views people hold toward privacy was one of the most surprising cultural differences between our countries. As an outsider I was shocked to learn that privacy really is an afterthought for a lot of bay area residents.

US anecdote: a product I worked on had a feature which needs full access to a customer's email account to use. The feature scrapes their inbox and can send emails impersonating our customers' staff. I said there was no way I'd use that feature, but it proved to be super popular! People had no problem handing over access to their entire (work) email account to a startup.

Australia anecdote: When my uncle died we needed to hunt down his bank details. The banks (by law) weren't allowed to even tell us if he was one of their customers without seeing his death certificate and our documentation.

I'm now way more nervous about trusting US based startups with my data. Its not just that many of the engineers are inexperienced, and most startups don't have any security expertise. Its also that culturally I know they probably don't understand personal privacy. I can't trust that they'll protect my data if they might not bother protecting their own.

On top of all the complete and utterly ... WRONG ... things that Centrelink have been doing lately, a billion dollar entity attacking a single, disadvantaged person furthers the depths of the inethical behaviours at display by the Australian government.

The list of wrong things include knowingly issuing pay-us-back-or-we'll-empty-your-bank-account legal notices incorrectly, when they clearly averaged e.g. a single high payment month over the whole period when the rules state this is not to be done. Then saying just call us, knowing the call wait lines are so horrid it is a whole day project just to get in touch with anyone.

I'm so over this government.

In this case, it's actually a government agency accumulating data on people who voluntarily choose to collect free money/free stuff from said agency.

https://www.humanservices.gov.au/customer/dhs/centrelink

I see no evidence that Centrelink collects any data on people who don't approach it with their hand out.

Centrelink is a government body; it is the public facing segment of the federal social security system in Australia.

And this is how it looks in the 3rd world.[1]

On 31 October, Congress party officials provided assailants with voter lists, school registration forms, and ration lists.[49] The lists were used to find the location of Sikh homes and business, an otherwise impossible task because they were located in unmarked and diverse neighbourhoods. On the night of 31 October, the night before the massacres began, assailants used the lists to mark the houses of Sikhs with letter "S".[49] In addition, because most of the mobs were illiterate, Congress Party officials provided help in reading the lists and leading the mobs to Sikh homes and businesses in the other neighbourhoods.[46] By using the lists the mobs were able to pinpoint the locations of Sikhs they otherwise would have missed.[46]

... One man, Amar Singh, escaped the initial attack on his house by having a Hindu neighbour drag him into his neighbour's house and declare him dead. However, a group of 18 assailants later came looking for his body, and when his neighbour replied that others had already taken away the body an assailant showed him a list and replied, "Look, Amar Singh's name has not been struck off from the list so his dead body has not been taken away."[46]

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_anti-Sikh_riots#Use_of_vo...

Not only in alignment with some entity collecting the information, in alignment with every entity that might ever look at the information -- for the rest of your life.

Centrelink has all sorts of horrible things said about it, and recently in particular they've been doing some pretty unethical things around debt collection. But the thing is that they're a government department full of civil servants. It's their role to implement policy, not to defend government actions - that's for politicians to do. It's not a tough position at all; the correct response is "We don't comment on private matters", and you hear large entities say it every day.

Imagine if the IRS released Trump's tax returns. Trump has been lying about them being held up by the IRS (all those years? seriously? can't release some old ones?), but the IRS refuse to be 'fair about it' because it's a matter of privacy. Even though they're being maligned and it's clearly in the public interest. This Centrelink issue is the exact same thing, except for the clear public interest.

Besides, Centrelink doesn't need a reputation, since they're not selling anything. People go there out of need, not desire.

Is there something wrong with the agency making a public statement refuting the allegations, citing the information they have (but without specifics for privacy reasons)? Surely that helps them without their having handed over information?

> there should be a legal way to prove a person is lying if they directly make accusations about you.

"about you"? Her article did not name or provide identifying information about any individual employee of Centrelink.

I think I can't quite follow your argument. Did you mean that the Guardian is trying to demand funding from someone, and they think they'll get this through this story somehow ? Would you mind explaining ?

> No doubt, mistakes happen in large bureaucracies but the story is usually slanted as some evil agency trying to destroy certain 'marginalised' sections of society. Whereas the truth is probably nothing like that.

The truth is that as an individual, especially one from a marginalized section of society, you are up against a powerful bureaucracy that has the ability to completely screw up your life, by mistake or not. So we as a society depend on holding these bureaucracies to very high standards.

It is also true that in any large bureaucracy, mistakes inevitably happen from time to time. One would wish for a leadership of said bureaucracy to handle these mistakes with integrity and from a position of confidence. By, for example, contacting this women directly, quietly resolving this issue and then adding this problem to the yearly statistics to prove you run a good ship. Who knows, this woman might have written a blog post singing your praises, after you resolved her problem for her. Certainly the better PR strategy.

If, on the other hand, you resolve to attacking your clients in public, violating their privacy rights in the process, then maybe you're too close to running an evil, rather than a responsible agency.

> Read the linked Centrelinks response and several things are refuted, so why in these comments is there an automatic pile on one side?

Did you read the refutation of the refutation as well ? I found the article presents the different viewpoints quite well. Including that this sort of pressure is able to stir up strong emotions.