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Melbourne professor quits after government pressure about reporting data breach

theguardian.com

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Re: Melbourne professor quits after government pressure about reporting data breach

#31

Post by dathinab »

Thorrez wrote: post #3

> The breach so shocked the government, the then attorney general, George Brandis, quickly announced plans to criminalise the act of re-identifying previously de-identified data, although ultimately the legislation never passed before the 2019 election. If Australia makes it illegal to re-identify information, what about information that has been re-identified outside Australia then distributed into Australia?

You don't have to go that far.

Anyone wanting to abuse the information (i.e. a criminal) would not really care to commit a crime by reidentifying so this law would only prevent people who want to help from doing so.

In the end the are always intelligent criminals (or foreign countries acting against your country for their interest). So you will always be able to buy deanonymized data on the black market. Even more the people doing it for that reason can include leaked/stolen datasets to do deanonymization invested if just public data making it potentially much easier.

Re: Melbourne professor quits after government pressure about reporting data breach

#33

Post by raxxorrax »

This is the worst kind of personal data leak. Government cannot keep any data safe. The only way is to not collect the information. The reaction of the government is predictable and poor.

Now it has hit Australia, but it could be have been any other country since data collection seems to be en vogue. Probably gives the impression of control, the usual.

Re: Melbourne professor quits after government pressure about reporting data breach

#34

Post by rzzzt »

DEADBEEFC0FFEE wrote: post #30
DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #14

When organizations claim to have "anonymized" a data set, what exactly does that mean? I.e., do they mean that nobody they talked to could think of a way to recover the identity of even one individual in the set with 100% certainty? Or is there some information-theoretical or legal standard of anonymization they're claiming to have met?

In hwalthcare there usually an ethics panel, that will look at the data, and look for way to reduce re-identification. The common example is the one-legged child with cancer from a remote town. You can remove a the PII columns and it's pretty easy to find that person.

One way around that is to drop all cases below a certain occurrence threshold, ie. if there aren't at least 1000 people in the same town with the same condition, they aren't getting into the dataset.

(The downside is that rare diseases might fall through the cracks.)

Re: Melbourne professor quits after government pressure about reporting data breach

#36

Post by throwawayjava »

dathinab wrote: post #31
Thorrez wrote: post #3

> The breach so shocked the government, the then attorney general, George Brandis, quickly announced plans to criminalise the act of re-identifying previously de-identified data, although ultimately the legislation never passed before the 2019 election. If Australia makes it illegal to re-identify information, what about information that has been re-identified outside Australia then distributed into Australia?

You don't have to go that far. Anyone wanting to abuse the information (i.e. a criminal) would not really care to commit a crime by reidentifying so this law would only prevent people who want to help from doing so. In the end the are always intelligent criminals (or foreign countries acting against your country for their interest). So you will always be able to buy deanonymized data on the black market. Even more th…

Consumer data brokers are a legal (non-criminal) business and they would definitely reidentify then well information if it weren't illegal.

Re: Melbourne professor quits after government pressure about reporting data breach

#37

Post by brokenmachine »

incompatible wrote: post #11
Tecuane wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relevant article, for the curious: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/malcolm-turnbull-prime-mi...

Former prime minister. His mathematics quote was a worded a bit strangely, but I think he was basically saying https://www.xkcd.com/538/

No, he was literally saying that he didn't care about reality.

He was a lawyer, so would be quite aware of the meaning of the words he was uttering.

Re: Melbourne professor quits after government pressure about reporting data breach

#38

Post by incompatible »

brokenmachine wrote: post #37
incompatible wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Former prime minister. His mathematics quote was a worded a bit strangely, but I think he was basically saying https://www.xkcd.com/538/

No, he was literally saying that he didn't care about reality. He was a lawyer, so would be quite aware of the meaning of the words he was uttering.

I doubt that he imagined that he could write a law that would force the encryption algorithms to yield to the ASIO. It was all about using a big stick to force people to help break encryption, by inserting back doors etc.

Sure he was a lawyer and banker and probably never should have been involved with things like encryption and the NBN, but that's politics for you.

Re: Melbourne professor quits after government pressure about reporting data breach

#39

Post by rstuart4133 »

kop316 wrote: post #6

To anyone coming to the comments, the title is misleading. The health department is pressuring her "to stop her speaking out about the Medicare and PBS history of over 2.5 million Australians being re-identifiable online due to a government bungle."

I'm not sure what is misleading about it. She has actually resigned from the University or Melbourne: https://twitter.com/VTeagueAus/status/1233241830994481152

Re: Melbourne professor quits after government pressure about reporting data breach

#40

Post by kop316 »

rstuart4133 wrote: post #39
kop316 wrote: post #6

To anyone coming to the comments, the title is misleading. The health department is pressuring her "to stop her speaking out about the Medicare and PBS history of over 2.5 million Australians being re-identifiable online due to a government bungle."

I'm not sure what is misleading about it. She has actually resigned from the University or Melbourne: https://twitter.com/VTeagueAus/status/1233241830994481152

The title changed since I posted this. The original title implied the professor leaked the offending data.
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