This was published 7 years ago
Australian census 2016: The ABS has ruined the fun
By John Birmingham
Thanks Australian Bureau of Statistics, you've ruined everything. The census is supposed to be fun. Or at least as much fun as filling out a form can be. And it's not just the coin toss between declaring yourself a Frisbeetarian or a Jedi Knight. (See last week's blog). The census is fun in the same way that putting a bunch of crap into a time capsule and burying it is fun. It's nerdalicious fun.
But nerds have pushed back against this year's census because the government is insisting that every little Vegemiter attach their personal ID to this year's survey. It doesn't matter that the ABS is ridiculously proud of the safety protocols it's built into the process to protect your privacy. It doesn't matter that severe penalties apply to public servants and agencies which disclose your personal information in breach of these protocols. None of this matters because the sense of trust, which was the magical fairy dust sprinkled over this exercise every five years, is gone. Not for everyone. Perhaps not even for a majority of people. But enough people have lost trust in the process of handing over to Canberra quite intimate details about their existence, that this year's census has birthed its own hashtag. #CensusFail.
The biggest dilemma on census night used to be deciding whether to be a Frisbeetarian or a Jedi Knight.
Opposition to the demand that we identify ourselves to the ABS ranges from the well-informed and highly principled all the way out to the far fringes of violent wingnuttery. It doesn't help that this is the first time the Bureau has defaulted to online lodgement over the old-fashioned paper booklets. Anyone with more than five minutes of experience on the Internet has probably developed a healthy scepticism about the very short lifespan of anything approaching privacy there. It's not simply the way the companies like Google and Facebook sell us out to their advertisers – it's the endless revelations of massive data breaches in supposedly secure digital storehouses.
Most of the reported breaches are the work of freelance hackers and hacker collectives, but the most serious are perpetrated by foreign governments as matters of state policy. The United States, which takes these things much more seriously than we do, has suffered serious and humiliating identity theft on a vast scale in Chinese government cyber raids. The Russian government is alleged to be interfering in the US election, right now, partly through targeting the IT systems of the Democratic Party. And the Snowdon revelations demonstrate our own governments to be world class abusers of their citizens' private lives.
This is the environment in which the ABS asks us to trust them.
In a way I feel sorry for these guys. They probably had no idea this shitstorm would break on them. They probably looked at the routine violations of privacy which happen millions of times every day. Think of the last time you tried to buy anything with a price tag of more than twenty bucks in a brick and mortar store. Did they take your email? If you declined to provide it, did they get kind of pushy and insistent?
It happens every day in clear violation of privacy law, and we go along with it because we're promised a five percent discount. Or a treat on our birthdays. (Usually another opportunity to spend more money for another pathetic discount.)
Once they have that email, though, they have you.
But go ahead, fight the good fight by doing tonight's census as your favourite Simpsons character. If Canberra are serious about not abusing your privacy, they can hardly check to find out, can they? Unless they hack the Chinese.