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Australia's new e-health platform crashes as people rush to opt-out

zdnet.com

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Re: Australia's new e-health platform crashes as people rush to opt-out

#51

Post by Avamander »

gruez wrote: post #47
Avamander wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* A single point of attack Totally the same with your data in that one primary doctor's office or whatever * No way to assure people it is ultimately secure, because it can never be Totally same with your paper records, someone could walk in and steal your data, imagine that. * Creeping requirements mean that a few years later, the government might change what they can use it for. Just like paper records, you can't s…

>Totally the same with your data in that one primary doctor's office or whatever still, it's a huge target compared to thousands of doctor's offices >Totally same with your paper records, someone could walk in and steal your data, imagine that. nowhere near as scaleable compared to hacking a site with everyone's records

So what you're saying is that someone is going to steal the entire medical database of everyone and that's somehow going to be more "scalable" than stealing paper records? If that database contained everyone's medical data it will not fit on anything that anyone non-state/non-corporate actor can aquire, and if you have state actor or corporate level of budget one could easily scale stealing paper medical records. I'm not so sure it's going to be easier to compromise super-guarded database compared to a lot of paper records, would like some hard numbers, but those are going to be hard to get.

Re: Australia's new e-health platform crashes as people rush to opt-out

#52

Post by Avamander »

tgb wrote: post #43
Avamander wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* A single point of attack Totally the same with your data in that one primary doctor's office or whatever * No way to assure people it is ultimately secure, because it can never be Totally same with your paper records, someone could walk in and steal your data, imagine that. * Creeping requirements mean that a few years later, the government might change what they can use it for. Just like paper records, you can't s…

Electronic records have a single point of attack for the entire country's data versus a breach at your local hospital. Makes beaches much worse while also greatly incentivizing the breach.

What about greatly incentivizing protecting that data compared to individual actors who won't bother? What about increased redundancy? What about improved medical care?

I don't think this is all this black and white as you paint it to be.

Re: Australia's new e-health platform crashes as people rush to opt-out

#53

Post by deevus »

This is a problem every time the government launches a new service. They always have "an unexpected amount of traffic".

The last time we had a census the "census night" was totally bust since the majority of Australian internet users tried to use the online form and hardly anyone succeeded. They tried to blame it on "hackers".

Leading up to census night there were threats of fines if you didn't submit on time, but due to the shitstorm with their online failures people were still submitting their census data months later.

Re: Australia's new e-health platform crashes as people rush to opt-out

#54

Post by Tharkun »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #2

The Australian government is paying doctors to upload patient records to a centralised government controlled database. The Australia government is incentivising doctors to sell client data to the government . What part of this is ok in any sense?

AFAIK the same thing has happened in Belgium. There are several databases, allegedly controller by hospital networks, which you can access using government ID. There's supposedly an opt-in clause, but I've certainly never opted in and all my x-rays are on the interwebz. Must be nice to be a 21st century government, where you can access any data on anyone in your country.

Re: Australia's new e-health platform crashes as people rush to opt-out

#55

Post by auslander »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #39
auslander wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... focusing on banking... - yeah. Commonwealth Bank Privacy Policy: 5. Who do we share your information with? - Service providers — for example, mortgage insurers, loyalty program partners and our product distributors - Businesses who do some of our work for us — including direct marketing, statement production, debt recovery and IT - support - Organisations involved in our funding arrangements — like loan purchas…

Yeah, how would they delete data they’ve already sold?

Good one :)

Re: Australia's new e-health platform crashes as people rush to opt-out

#57

Post by Avamander »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #42
Avamander wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* A single point of attack Totally the same with your data in that one primary doctor's office or whatever * No way to assure people it is ultimately secure, because it can never be Totally same with your paper records, someone could walk in and steal your data, imagine that. * Creeping requirements mean that a few years later, the government might change what they can use it for. Just like paper records, you can't s…

I believe you’ve misunderstood the concept of single point of attack . This means single point of attsck for everyone with an ehealth record . With paper records, or in-house digital records, a hacker / thief, or malicious government, or what have you, has to compromise many systems. The same applies to your paper record comment.

> I believe you’ve misunderstood the concept of single point of attack.

Single point in who's perspective though, OP worded it more like (s)he cares about his/her data not everyone else's (e.g. "I visit another doctor when on holiday - they don't have my records"). But yes, you are right about it being in general a higher risk endeavour. The question now is though, when other commenters here describe how their life and career could get in danger when someone steals their data, which do you think is going to be much harder to breach, your local doctor's office or a central database that's guarded by armed guards and experts?

Re: Australia's new e-health platform crashes as people rush to opt-out

#58

Post by Avamander »

pjc50 wrote: post #44
Avamander wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* A single point of attack Totally the same with your data in that one primary doctor's office or whatever * No way to assure people it is ultimately secure, because it can never be Totally same with your paper records, someone could walk in and steal your data, imagine that. * Creeping requirements mean that a few years later, the government might change what they can use it for. Just like paper records, you can't s…

This is true "on paper", but in practice our whole industry is built on the fact that electronic records behave qualitively differently from paper records because they're so much easier to handle. You can't steal everyone 's paper records all at once in the way you can with electronic records, for example.

> You can't steal everyone's paper records all at once in the way you can with electronic records, for example.

You're assuming you can steal the entire database at once which most certainly will also be noticed and stopped swiftly.

Re: Australia's new e-health platform crashes as people rush to opt-out

#59

Post by chopin »

shakna wrote: post #22
rjvbk wrote: post #19

Having a centralised system with health records is bad? I've had that since I was born in my country and I think it's useful and handy. Something happens to you, they know what could've been, if you're on meds, what things and meds you're allergic to, etc. I guess the outrage makes sense when looked from an American point of view where you distrust the government by principle?

Its not the idea that Australians mistrust - its the implementation. No great technical project in the last couple decades has been successful. Under the current government we have the broken NBN, the fractured MyGov that has been repeatedly hacked, the falling over census website, other broken health care systems. We can't trust that they can build it safely.

You should mistrust the idea as well. Scope creep is a thing.

Re: Australia's new e-health platform crashes as people rush to opt-out

#60

Post by Avamander »

Spooky23 wrote: post #45
Avamander wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* A single point of attack Totally the same with your data in that one primary doctor's office or whatever * No way to assure people it is ultimately secure, because it can never be Totally same with your paper records, someone could walk in and steal your data, imagine that. * Creeping requirements mean that a few years later, the government might change what they can use it for. Just like paper records, you can't s…

Paper records have a better scope. It isn’t economically justifiable to steal paper. Electronic records are easier to steal and cheap to sell, mine or otherwise utilize.

> Electronic records are easier to steal

How are they easier to steal? I would really like to know.

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