The Australian Privacy Foundation fully supports recent calls by the Opposition Parties, Dr Kerryn Phelps, lawyers, clinicians, educators and others to extend the period when people can opt-out of being registered for a government owned and controlled My Health Record. There is obvious broad disquiet and substantive community concern: over a million people have opted… Read More

Whatever arguments are put up for and against My Health Record and the current push to make it opt-out, there are two inescapable facts: 1. My Health Record is a Federal Government owned, controlled and operated information system. The government collects your health data, never deletes it and will keep it for at least 30… Read More

Did you know that the government is already buying health data from your GP? My Health Record (formerly known as the PCEHR) has been working since July 2012. Initially it was hardly used, which raises the question – if it’s so good why was it not promoted and used by GPs? Rather than address the… Read More

JOINT MEDIA RELEASE BY ELECTRONIC FRONTIERS AUSTRALIA, FUTURE WISE, AND THE AUSTRALIAN PRIVACY FOUNDATIONEFA, Future Wise and APF today denounced the actions of HealthEngine and its doctor appointment booking system which has been sharing patient data with law firms, marketers, and other entities with the flimsiest pretense of patient consent. “If this ethically dubious behaviour… Read More

Has Canberra learned the wrong lesson from Cambridge Analytica: abusing ‘informed consent’ gives you a plausible excuse? Exploiting ignorance, inaction and misplaced trust gets you the Big Data?
Our advice on My Health Record, like that of Dr Katherine Kemp, a specialist in data privacy [1], is to Opt-Out while you still can: we now know that your once-off chance to protect your medical confidentiality begins on 16 July and expires on 15 October 2018. Read More

There can be benefits from the ‘sharing’ (distribution) of health and other personal information  among health care professionals and researchers. Any such ‘sharing’ must, however, be based on an understanding of potential risks. It must only occur within an effective legal framework, and controls appropriate for those risks. A ‘Trust me, I’m from the government!’… Read More

It is reported recently [1] that the Federal government will be registering everyone who doesn’t already have one for a My Health Record but has no intention of proactively informing Australians of this gross invasion of their privacy. My Health Record is designed to store data on government servers about your medical treatment. As Mr… Read More

Centrelink has recently delegated decision-making about people’s entitlements to a computer.

And, surprise, surprise, neither the data nor the software are good enough to support the process.

As a result, thousands of people have received demands for copies of old documents, and have been wrongly subjected to ham-fisted actions by commercial debt-collectors. Read More