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Australian welfare recipient’s data released to counter public criticism

theguardian.com

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Re: Australian welfare recipient’s data released to counter public criticism

#31

Post by pessimizer »

literallycancer wrote: post #11
yosamino wrote: post #8

This is a good example of why the "I don't have anything to hide" argument is incorrect. That way of thinking only works as long as your goals and positions are aligned with the entity collecting information about you to begin with. If they're not, or the situation changes, imbalances of information lead to disadvantages for you pretty quickly. All it took was some bureaucrat feeling petty.

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 t…

And in the first world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

"The 1933 census, with design help and tabulation services provided by IBM through its German subsidiary, proved to be pivotal to the Nazis in their efforts to identify, isolate, and ultimately destroy the country's Jewish minority. Machine-tabulated census data greatly expanded the estimated number of Jews in Germany by identifying individuals with only one or a few Jewish ancestors. Previous estimates of 400,000 to 600,000 were abandoned for a new estimate of 2 million Jews in the nation of 65 million.[15]"

Re: Australian welfare recipient’s data released to counter public criticism

#32

Post by yummyfajitas »

yosamino wrote: post #8

This is a good example of why the "I don't have anything to hide" argument is incorrect. That way of thinking only works as long as your goals and positions are aligned with the entity collecting information about you to begin with. If they're not, or the situation changes, imbalances of information lead to disadvantages for you pretty quickly. All it took was some bureaucrat feeling petty.

Keeping in mind that this organization was a welfare office, what's the solution? Should the government stop keeping records of how much money welfare recipients have collected? Should they not keep logs of calls to customer support, tax payments and similar things?

If a person is unable to manage their own life and requires the government to be their parent, it's unclear to me how the bureaucracy can simultaneously manage their life for them and also not keep records.

Re: Australian welfare recipient’s data released to counter public criticism

#33

Post by yummyfajitas »

prawn wrote: post #19
yummyfajitas wrote: post #16

In the event that this release was illegal, I really do feel for the people at the agency. Someone made public false allegations about them and they are legally forbidden from proving that person wrong. It's a tough position to be in. I don't have a good solution to this, but I do think that there should be a legal way to prove a person is lying if they directly make accusations about you. After all, they are the one…

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?

"She's wrong but we can't release any evidence proving it" doesn't seem very effective.

Re: Australian welfare recipient’s data released to counter public criticism

#34

Post by jbapple »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #29
jbapple wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there some meaningful distinction here that means false allegations about an organization of humans should go unrefuted, but false allegations about a single human should be refuted? To me, false allegations against individuals are more serious than false allegations against organizations for a few reasons. First, I care about the well-being of organizations only to the extent they positively impact the well-bei…

In this case, the false allegations were spread with the implicit goal of getting the government to spend more money/resources fixing problems that may not exist. If successful, that would result in a huge amount of waste, which harms real humans. Even if it were a private organization, such allegations could directly result in harm to the human owners. For example, false allegations about bad food at a restaurant wo…

While all of these are possible and all of these are bad outcomes, I think that their probability of happening and the magnitude of the result is less bad than what would occur if allegations of cruelty or incompetence were made against an individual.

I don't think we're going to be able to settle this argument here, so I'll just leave it at that.

Re: Australian welfare recipient’s data released to counter public criticism

#35

Post by tjalfi »

literallycancer wrote: post #11
yosamino wrote: post #8

This is a good example of why the "I don't have anything to hide" argument is incorrect. That way of thinking only works as long as your goals and positions are aligned with the entity collecting information about you to begin with. If they're not, or the situation changes, imbalances of information lead to disadvantages for you pretty quickly. All it took was some bureaucrat feeling petty.

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 t…

The US Census provided names and addresses for the Japanese internment.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/confirmed-the-us-...

Re: Australian welfare recipient’s data released to counter public criticism

#36

Post by DanielBMarkham »

pessimizer wrote: post #27
Bartweiss wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the strongest point. Not having anything you're ashamed of does not mean not having anything to hide - it's all too possible for completely harmless traits like ethnicity and sexuality to become targets for someone else.

The most scary aspect is that if I know everything about you, I can frame you for a crime for which you will have no alibi, or threaten to in exchange for you doing what I ask. The second was a tactic often used by the Stasi to create more operatives - call someone in for questioning, accuse them of a crime for which they have no alibi, such as spying, and when they protest their innocence, ask them to help the gover…

The Stasi is a good model for how quickly and badly this can go off the rails.

The way it's supposed to work is that you have some public event of importance: a crime, a person applies for a security clearance, or whatnot. Based on that event, the state then conducts and investigation to see if there are any data they can discover that might lead to a response.

The new way of working is that you collect all the data, on everyone, all the time. Then there's no more event. The only thing you do is pick out the person. Once you have the person, it's a simple data mining exercise (along with a lot of interrogation techniques) that takes care of the person. What's the old saying in communist countries? "You have a man. You have a problem. No more man, no more problem"

Functional societies focus on events. Dysfunctional societies focus on the people.

Re: Australian welfare recipient’s data released to counter public criticism

#37

Post by sjwright »

prawn wrote: post #20
jbapple wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Doesn't Australian defamation law only apply to organisations below a certain size? (15 employees or FTE - something like that.)

Fewer than 10 employees and not related to any other corporation.

The relevant section: http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/nsw/consol_act/da200599/s... (This is the New South Wales legislation but it's almost perfectly uniform in all states and territories.)

Re: Australian welfare recipient’s data released to counter public criticism

#38

Post by ro_sharp »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #32
yosamino wrote: post #8

This is a good example of why the "I don't have anything to hide" argument is incorrect. That way of thinking only works as long as your goals and positions are aligned with the entity collecting information about you to begin with. If they're not, or the situation changes, imbalances of information lead to disadvantages for you pretty quickly. All it took was some bureaucrat feeling petty.

Keeping in mind that this organization was a welfare office, what's the solution? Should the government stop keeping records of how much money welfare recipients have collected? Should they not keep logs of calls to customer support, tax payments and similar things? If a person is unable to manage their own life and requires the government to be their parent, it's unclear to me how the bureaucracy can simultaneously…

What the article is suggesting is that perhaps the release of a person's private financial information by a government agency is not something the broader community would consider to be acceptable. From reading this comment and others it appears you have a personal political view regarding the extent of Australia's social safety net, which I would suggest is not particularly relevant to the debate. What is relevant, however, is that the release of this information to the media was actively approved by Alan Tudge, the current minister for the Human Services portfolio.

Re: Australian welfare recipient’s data released to counter public criticism

#39

Post by sp332 »

mdpopescu wrote: post #12
josephg wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thei…

I worked on a financial product based on one of Intuit's. I was shocked to realize that this Intuit product was impersonating people (using their username and password) to log on to their bank accounts and download all transactions - which our product was then analyzing. I was sure nobody would allow that; who will give a third-party their bank username and password? I was extremely surprised to find out that the ans…

Banks don't tend to have APIs though. Either you give up your username and password, or you don't get centralized reporting. Those are your only options.

Anyway fraudulent bank transactions are relatively easy to undo, and they have really high penalties and are enforced by FBI agents who don't play around.

Re: Australian welfare recipient’s data released to counter public criticism

#40

Post by yosamino »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #32
yosamino wrote: post #8

This is a good example of why the "I don't have anything to hide" argument is incorrect. That way of thinking only works as long as your goals and positions are aligned with the entity collecting information about you to begin with. If they're not, or the situation changes, imbalances of information lead to disadvantages for you pretty quickly. All it took was some bureaucrat feeling petty.

Keeping in mind that this organization was a welfare office, what's the solution? Should the government stop keeping records of how much money welfare recipients have collected? Should they not keep logs of calls to customer support, tax payments and similar things? If a person is unable to manage their own life and requires the government to be their parent, it's unclear to me how the bureaucracy can simultaneously…

> If a person is unable to manage their own life and requires the government to be their parent

That snide comment is really uncalled for. I hope you will never be in a situation where you require assistance, government or other.

But to your larger point:

Maybe government and other bureaucracy should strive to collect only that personal data that is strictly necessary for them to function and create a culture in their organization which emphasizes the importance of keeping private data private, and public data public.

I'm not saying that there aren't sometimes conflicts between the two, but in general I would like for this issue to be taken seriously, instead of having to fear my information being used against me for petty reasons by these organisations. Whether I depend on them (which makes this a whole lot more sinister) or not.

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