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posted by janrinok on Sunday April 01 2018, @01:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the nothing-to-hide dept.

Australia's Privacy Commissioner has ruled that the Australian Department of Health unintentionally breached Australian Privacy law when it published the possessively de-identified health data of 10 per cent of the population from Medicare Benefits Scheme (MBS) and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS).

When researchers at the University of Melbourne re-identified the data they matched at least seven well known Australians including members of parliament by crossing the data with other sources such as Wikipedia, Facebook and news websites. The Australian Health department must in future review and enhance its data governance and release processes with oversight from the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. The dataset containing the health data was around 3 billion lines long covering 2.5 million people and was downloaded around 1500 times.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 01 2018, @09:20AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 01 2018, @09:20AM (#661089)

    The Australian Government is run by committees who don't have any skin in the game that they play. Failure means promotion. They simply don't give a damn and won't be paying a price, but 2 million people will have no idea why their identity keeps getting stolen.