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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: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Sunday April 01 2018, @10:25AM

    by fido_dogstoyevsky (131) <axehandleNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Sunday April 01 2018, @10:25AM (#661100)

    Well, did anybody "fudge" a little bit when they handed you those "three simple health questions" in order to get insurance?...

    If it's Medicare there aren't any questions - apart from "what's your Medicare number?"

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    It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
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