The 9 August 2016 is census night in Australia. The Australian government requires every person in the country to provide the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) with detailed information about themselves.
The ABS uses powerful data mining technology to sort through the mountains of information to take a 'snapshot' of the nation. Government departments and researchers rely on this information to guide policy that is targeted at the likely needs of the population.
In the past, and in a time of far less capacity to manipulate datasets, the information has been collected on paper. After a couple of trials at previous censuses however, 2016 sees the ABS roll out a fully online census. And that is not the only change.
Just before Christmas in 2015, the ABS announced some ostensibly innocuous but in fact more far-reaching changes to Census 2016 — namely the retention of names and addresses forever. Since then however, and in the face of substantial criticism, the ABS has backed down. Names and addresses will only be kept until 2020, we are now told, at which point they will be discarded.
Before discarding our names and addresses, the statistician will convert them into a 'linkage key' — a unique numerical identifier for our personal set of information. The key will allow two things.
First, it will allow the ABS or other researchers who use ABS data, to link our census information with other government databases. Secondly, it will allow the ABS to run longitudinal studies on us — it can link our key from 2016 with our data in subsequent censuses.
Despite assurances from the ABS that our privacy is paramount, and an acknowledged need for statistical data to support evidence-based policy making, Australians should exercise healthy scepticism about the state holding our personal data, notably with the provision and retention of our names, and the resulting linkage key. Of concern is that many simply don't see what the fuss is about.
Because the state's request for information is ostensibly so reasonable, it is easy to dismiss privacy concerns as unreasonable. Census data would, for example, help decide whether to build new schools or aged care facilities in a community, based on the community's demographics. This is an important and sensible purpose for government statistics.
"Through this system, the state has removed our individual capacity to establish boundaries between itself and us."
Governments already hold significant amounts of our personal data. In Australia, each state and the Commonwealth have privacy legislation to protect citizens from misuse of our data. As I wrote recently, there is good reason why we agree to share personal information with government. It provides us with access to services and allows us to contribute as engaged citizens. Giving information to a census would be part of this trade off.
Instead the problem is that the state has now developed a system requiring personal information under compulsion of law where the system has increasingly powerful capacity to store, sort, match, and even to predict our lives in fine-grained detail. The system is neither good nor bad — but it certainly has the capacity for far more than mere statistics, and some see it as offering the potential for surveillance.
Through this system, the state has removed our individual capacity to establish boundaries between the state and us. This 'breathing space' would otherwise allow us to be ourselves, guided by our social interactions and value systems, and free to become engaged citizens away from the gaze of the state. This is the nature of privacy.
Government promises to protect our privacy are important, but miss an essential issue with the current arrangements. Once we have given our information, our privacy has already been breached. The state's understanding of 'privacy' suggests that it will protect us from interlopers' misuse of our data without acknowledging that tracking us through our lives is a breach in the first place.
Understandably perhaps, government wishes to capitalise on our data using new data mining technologies. The ABS uses the language of efficiency and public interest in justifying the changes. It even implies that the new online census is environmentally friendly. It may well be that collecting and retaining our names along with our personal information is efficient — but that does not address the foundation question of whether we as citizens retain the privacy that constitutes us as members of a liberal democratic society.
As with Bentham's panopticon, the state may not be looking at us — now — but the systems that the ABS is establishing for this census and beyond give the state the capacity to look at us, at any time. 'Providing new insights where information has previously not been available' by integrating data, as the ABS says, offers entirely new possibilities for our personal information. Lulling the Australian citizenry into compliance enculturates us to giving personal information to the state, and having it tracked and linked. Once this is normalised the possibility for boundaries between state and citizen is radically reduced, with a commensurate increase in state power.
We need to ask whether this is what we want.
Kate Galloway is a legal academic with an interest in social justice.