Dr Stephen Duckett of the Grattan Institute wrote a particularly poor piece on the My Health Record system. His article is available here:
This post is my response, lightly edited with some footnotes added.
Today on a mailing list I frequent someone accused the Australian Government’s MyHR (“MyHealthRecord”) system of being designed for the bureaucrats, not to further patients’ interests. Another person responded, saying that it was wrong to accuse people of deliberately designing the system that way. Strangely enough I agree with both of them – but the former more than the latter.
In this article about privacy, civil liberties and the way the “war on terror” has become a war on all of us, John Pilger asks “What are you going to do about it?”
Well, here’s my question, John: What can I do about it?
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On a mailing list that I frequent, someone recently posted a set of statements which gave me pause for thought. I thought about the millions (billions?) of personal details stored in private collections of personal details, also known as contact lists. And I thought about how little care we take about how we treat that information.
I will summarise the statements as follows:
Which led me wonder what details the writer might have collected about his numerous contacts. Name, address, phone, email, birthday…? And without asking all these people whether it’s OK with them, the writer is wanting and planning to dump their details (automatically if possible) into multiple privacy-hostile service providers’ databases. For the sake of convenience.
Given the state of privacy laws in Australia and their near-total lack of meaningful enforcement, no-one can stop this person doing whatever they like with whatever data they collect.
But if you are like this person, and think that my personal details are yours to do as you please with, and specifically yours to share with large commercial third parties whose avowed intention is to collect all the data in the Universe, I do have a request.
Please – forget me. Before you make me unforgettable.
[This was written in 2006 in reaction to a then-proposed Australian benefits card, but it applies to any similar card, proposed by any Government, in any country. The card was intended, allegedly, to support access to welfare; in practice, however, the proposal described an identity card…]