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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Australia's Privacy Commissioner has ruled that the Australian Department of Health unintentionally breached Australian Privacy law [canberratimes.com.au] 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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