HEALTH DATA OF ONE IN TEN AUSTRALIANS EXPOSED
Another shocking health data breach has occurred on Turnbull’s watch – with the revelation that one in ten Australians have had their medical records compromised by a publicly available Government dataset.
Researchers from the University of Melbourne were able to link medical records with individual people – including three former, or current MPs, and an AFL footballer.
Critically – the Turnbull Government has known about this since December 2016 – and they didn’t even bother to tell Australians.
Last year, the Department of Health published 1 billion lines of health data from around 2.9 million Australians, with the dataset pulled down when it was discovered the data could be re-encrypted to doctors.
At the time, the Department said that “no patient information has been compromised.” [29 SEPTEMBER 2017]
This has now been exposed as a lie.
The Department has already admitted that that there were 1500 downloads of some or all of the 43 data files – files that we now know can reveal someone’s most sensitive medical details.
The Turnbull Government should now have the decency to inform Australians if their health data has been compromised – as they would have to do under the Government’s own mandatory data breach legislation starting next year.
It is absolutely disgraceful that the Turnbull Government has been sitting on this information for twelve months – and hasn’t even had the decency to inform Australians about it.