In the week before Christmas last year, the Australian Bureau of Statistics quietly trashed your privacy. We have only a few months to claim it back.
In December 2015, the ABS announced its plans to collect and keep the name and address of every person in Australia, starting with the August 2016 census. They then plan to use your name and address to link your census answers to other sets of data, like health and educational records, so that the ABS can do things like "(understand) and support ... people who require mental health services".
This proposal represents the most significant and intrusive collection of identifiable data about you, me, and every other Australian, that has ever been attempted. It will allow the ABS to build up, over time, a rich and deep picture of every Australian's life, in an identifiable form.
Up until now, the name and address portion of census forms was not retained by the ABS; just as soon as the rest of your census answers were transcribed, the paper forms were destroyed.
But the new proposal is to keep name and address, as well as your answers to all the Census questions included this year, such as sex, age, marital status, indigenous status, religious affiliation, income, education level, ancestry, language spoken at home, occupation, work address, previous home address, vehicles garaged at your address, and the relationships between people living in the same home.
, don't force it, it just really clicks with me.
