The power corporations are accumulating with information on intimate customer behavior and the glacial response of society to this is a daily refrain on HN. Has anyone seen a comprehensive, or at least collected, list of canonical examples of strong arguments for:
* Raising awareness amongst non-technical folks that such incredible stocking up of PII can raise complicated ethical risks?
* Giving legislative representatives practical and defensible reasons to not just go with the flow and actually have a chance to offer smart legislative options without being shot down?
This particular example is alarming - I can picture plenty of corporations that wouldn't mind the idea of "customer service" representatives casually raising the prospect of releasing customer PII in order to "show their side of the story" as leverage in situations where a customer is threatening to go to an Ombudsman or other public forum.
On top of all the complete and utterly ... WRONG ... things that Centrelink have been doing lately, a billion dollar entity attacking a single, disadvantaged person furthers the depths of the inethical behaviours at display by the Australian government.
The list of wrong things include knowingly issuing pay-us-back-or-we'll-empty-your-bank-account legal notices incorrectly, when they clearly averaged e.g. a single high payment month over the whole period when the rules state this is not to be done. Then saying just call us, knowing the call wait lines are so horrid it is a whole day project just to get in touch with anyone.
It is beyond bizarre that their own legal counsel approved the release, especially since they're also under the spotlight at the moment. I'm not sure how they expect to 'maintain public trust by showing their side of the story' when that involves violating privacy.
No doubting the veracity of this occurrence, but it is baffling that it happened nonetheless - federal government departments here (Australia) are usually cautious to a paranoid level when it comes to people even looking at information. I remember cases when curious internal staff members at the tax and social security offices being sacked on the spot for merely doing searches on celebrity names without due reason.
Both my sisters work in law enforcement agencies, and tell me that their every action on their computer systems is tracked and logged. Once when my younger sister worked in the Traffic infringement section of the local police department, I asked her to check up if I was actually pinged by a remote speed camera that morning as I suspected I was. She refused, on the grounds that any such searches were tracked, and if it was found she did a search against a vehicle belonging to a close family member, it would trigger an internal investigation by the ethics team.
I'm an Australian who lived a couple of years in the Bay Area. The views people hold toward privacy was one of the most surprising cultural differences between our countries. As an outsider I was shocked to learn that privacy really is an afterthought for a lot of bay area residents.
US anecdote: a product I worked on had a feature which needs full access to a customer's email account to use. The feature scrapes their inbox and can send emails impersonating our customers' staff. I said there was no way I'd use that feature, but it proved to be super popular! People had no problem handing over access to their entire (work) email account to a startup.
Australia anecdote: When my uncle died we needed to hunt down his bank details. The banks (by law) weren't allowed to even tell us if he was one of their customers without seeing his death certificate and our documentation.
I'm now way more nervous about trusting US based startups with my data. Its not just that many of the engineers are inexperienced, and most startups don't have any security expertise. Its also that culturally I know they probably don't understand personal privacy. I can't trust that they'll protect my data if they might not bother protecting their own.
I worked on a financial product based on one of Intuit's. I was shocked to realize that this Intuit product was impersonating people (using their username and password) to log on to their bank accounts and download all transactions - which our product was then analyzing. I was sure nobody would allow that; who will give a third-party their bank username and password?
I was extremely surprised to find out that the answer was "at least tens of thousands of people".
I wonder if people know how much their data is being accessed by 3rd parties? Maybe it starts with Intuit getting permission for something convenient and a few unread, auto opt-in "change of service agreements" later, they can share it with everyone.
Banks don't tend to have APIs though. Either you give up your username and password, or you don't get centralized reporting. Those are your only options.
Anyway fraudulent bank transactions are relatively easy to undo, and they have really high penalties and are enforced by FBI agents who don't play around.
Fastmail is Australian. If you have a support issue and need to have an email examined they refuse to help unless you create a top level folder called "forwebmaster" and put the email there.
The first time I had to do this it solidified my trust in their services.
This is a good example of why the "I don't have anything to hide" argument is incorrect.
That way of thinking only works as long as your goals and positions are aligned with the entity collecting information about you to begin with.
If they're not, or the situation changes, imbalances of information lead to disadvantages for you pretty quickly.
Not only in alignment with some entity collecting the information, in alignment with every entity that might ever look at the information -- for the rest of your life.
This is the strongest point. Not having anything you're ashamed of does not mean not having anything to hide - it's all too possible for completely harmless traits like ethnicity and sexuality to become targets for someone else.
Your actions may be legal now, but that may not always be the case. You may be protected from retroactive prosecution now, but that may not always be the case. Data doesn't just go away.
The most scary aspect is that if I know everything about you, I can frame you for a crime for which you will have no alibi, or threaten to in exchange for you doing what I ask.
The second was a tactic often used by the Stasi to create more operatives - call someone in for questioning, accuse them of a crime for which they have no alibi, such as spying, and when they protest their innocence, ask them to help the government with something to show their good faith. That something could easily be to provide a pretext for arresting the real target.
The Stasi is a good model for how quickly and badly this can go off the rails.
The way it's supposed to work is that you have some public event of importance: a crime, a person applies for a security clearance, or whatnot. Based on that event, the state then conducts and investigation to see if there are any data they can discover that might lead to a response.
The new way of working is that you collect all the data, on everyone, all the time. Then there's no more event. The only thing you do is pick out the person. Once you have the person, it's a simple data mining exercise (along with a lot of interrogation techniques) that takes care of the person. What's the old saying in communist countries? "You have a man. You have a problem. No more man, no more problem"
Functional societies focus on events. Dysfunctional societies focus on the people.
On 31 October, Congress party officials provided assailants with voter lists, school registration forms, and ration lists.[49] The lists were used to find the location of Sikh homes and business, an otherwise impossible task because they were located in unmarked and diverse neighbourhoods. On the night of 31 October, the night before the massacres began, assailants used the lists to mark the houses of Sikhs with letter "S".[49] In addition, because most of the mobs were illiterate, Congress Party officials provided help in reading the lists and leading the mobs to Sikh homes and businesses in the other neighbourhoods.[46] By using the lists the mobs were able to pinpoint the locations of Sikhs they otherwise would have missed.[46]
... One man, Amar Singh, escaped the initial attack on his house by having a Hindu neighbour drag him into his neighbour's house and declare him dead. However, a group of 18 assailants later came looking for his body, and when his neighbour replied that others had already taken away the body an assailant showed him a list and replied, "Look, Amar Singh's name has not been struck off from the list so his dead body has not been taken away."[46]
"The 1933 census, with design help and tabulation services provided by IBM through its German subsidiary, proved to be pivotal to the Nazis in their efforts to identify, isolate, and ultimately destroy the country's Jewish minority. Machine-tabulated census data greatly expanded the estimated number of Jews in Germany by identifying individuals with only one or a few Jewish ancestors. Previous estimates of 400,000 to 600,000 were abandoned for a new estimate of 2 million Jews in the nation of 65 million.[15]"
Keeping in mind that this organization was a welfare office, what's the solution? Should the government stop keeping records of how much money welfare recipients have collected? Should they not keep logs of calls to customer support, tax payments and similar things?
If a person is unable to manage their own life and requires the government to be their parent, it's unclear to me how the bureaucracy can simultaneously manage their life for them and also not keep records.
What the article is suggesting is that perhaps the release of a person's private financial information by a government agency is not something the broader community would consider to be acceptable. From reading this comment and others it appears you have a personal political view regarding the extent of Australia's social safety net, which I would suggest is not particularly relevant to the debate. What is relevant, however, is that the release of this information to the media was actively approved by Alan Tudge, the current minister for the Human Services portfolio.
> If a person is unable to manage their own life and requires the government to be their parent
That snide comment is really uncalled for. I hope you will never be in a situation where you require assistance, government or other.
But to your larger point:
Maybe government and other bureaucracy should strive to collect only that personal data that is strictly necessary for them to function and create a culture in their organization which emphasizes the importance of keeping private data private, and public data public.
I'm not saying that there aren't sometimes conflicts between the two, but in general I would like for this issue to be taken seriously, instead of having to fear my information being used against me for petty reasons by these organisations. Whether I depend on them (which makes this a whole lot more sinister) or not.
This case is pretty clearly a conflict. The person in question already released a bunch of information about her situation, but it was released in a dishonest manner designed to make the people on whom she was dependent look bad.
Perhaps that conflict doesn't rise to the level that should be necessary to protect privacy, but I think that's at least worth discussing. Is it really productive to prevent government organizations from refuting lies told about them?
That snide comment is really uncalled for. I hope you will never be in a situation where you require assistance, government or other.
I notice that you don't characterize my comment as wrong, you merely criticize the tone.
You should read this great article which explains how tone policing is actually just a silencing tactic used by privileged people to avoid confronting the actual content of a message.
I honestly think that government organizations don't have any business policing what people say about them. They aren't people; their reputation is not terribly pertinent to getting their job done.
Oh, and criticizing tone alongside substantive comments isn't the same as 'a silencing tactic'. Its an effort to keep our forum civil. An actual silencing tactic might look like, calling names like 'privileged people' to shame someone, and redirecting the topic with an irrelevant web link to attempt to look like an authority on discussions like this.
It's not about reputation management, it's about an unfortunate effect of democracy: the public is put in the position of making policy, and if the public is misled they might make the wrong policy.
On the opposite side of the world, note all the criticism of "FAKE news" and the desire by many people for large corporations collecting data on billions of people to police it. The reason is that a population which doesn't understand reality cannot effectively make decisions about it.
I called no one privileged and attempted to silence no one. I merely observed that tone policing is not actually an assertion that anything I said was false.
Can you tell me what's "uncivil" about my comment? Would a comment expressing sentiment with opposing mood affiliation also be uncivil?
> I merely observed that tone policing is not actually an assertion that anything I said was false.
Thinking that what someone said was false, is not a necessary condition for replying to comments on a message board. I don't know how you ended up thinking that.
> Can you tell me what's "uncivil" about my comment?
Yes, it's uncivil to imply that someone who receives government assistance is basically a child and needs a parent, because they're not fit to run their own lives. There are a myriad of reasons why someone might end up in that position, that have nothing to do with being unable to handle your affairs.
I think you're going about this a bit too simple and too confrontational.
Your original comment started out with a generalizing remark which I felt to be uncivil and I called out out on it.
I didn't actually completely disagree with the rest of your comment. Do you understand this ? You raised a perfectly valid point.
My only disagreement with you is that you decided it is good etiquette to insult a whole group of people by implying they have the real-world capacity of children.
I will repeat it again for you:
* I disagree with what I thought was an insulting remark.
* I thought the points you made afterwards were valid and intriguing
Please do not try to misunderstand me on purpose again.
For what it's worth, I usually upvote yummyfajitas' comments and I find him/her a very valuable part of HN, but in this particular case I downvoted because I think they erred on the side of insulting in their comment. Judging by the gray, others might've felt the same way. In my opinion it distracts from the actual points that were made.
That said, it is a decent possible that no insult was intended, so I'd suggest we just move on and discuss the content rather than the tone.
FWIW I think yosamino's objection there plainly shows why your comment was wrong and indeed uncivil, and not just a matter of 'tone'. In fact I was going to post much the same thing until I saw that he or she already had. I'm a little surprised that you can't concede a point and instead responded with so weak a distraction.
> You should read this great article which explains how tone policing is actually just a silencing tactic used by privileged people to avoid confronting the actual content of a message.
Maybe yosamino was tone policing you, but how about this: I'm calling your statement out as being factually wrong. You accuse and malign someone without any evidence, beyond the fact that they were on welfare. Without proof, your assertion is at best an ad hominem attack.
It is not an ad hominem attack. It would be an ad-hominem attack if I said or implied the person was wrong because she was unable to manage her life. I said she was wrong because the data released by Centrelink shows her to be wrong. This is not disputed by the article under discussion, or any parties here.
(Unless you dispute this? Perhaps you think Centrelink's data is forged?)
The comment Yosamino attempted to tone police merely asserted that she is unable to manage her life because she is dependent on centrelink, much like I was dependent on my parents for subsistence when I was a child. Is this in dispute? Do you believe she is actually not really in need of welfare, and is actually just taking taxpayer money for the heck of it?
You're comparing Ms. Fox to a child; I would say that counts as an insult. Furthermore, "not being able to manage your life" is not the same thing as "not needing welfare". Needing and getting help is not the same thing as being incompetent.
> Is this in dispute?
Yes, and this is in fact mentioned in the article, albeit in a single sentence.
> I notice that you don't characterize my comment as wrong, you merely criticize the tone.
It was not my intention to characterize your comment as wrong, I was expanding on your valid question about how a bureaucracy should deal with data, by giving you my opinion. Are you under the impression that this conversation is about winning ?
In addition, it is disingenuous of you to imply that every one who receives government assistance is basically a child, unable to exist without a parent, and then get all thin-skinned when getting called out on it.
If you want to make needlessly inflammatory remarks, be prepared to deal with the consequences.
In this case the consequence to you was so harmless, that I even took the next sentence you wrote seriously, agreed with you and gave you my opinion.
Closing remark: Don't use concepts like "tone policing" which describe a real thing, that real people experience when they're in a position of inferior power to try and tell me I am a baddie and that you feel bad, from being softly called out for being inflammatory on purpose. It's not the same thing, and it's a bit embarrassing for you.
Tone policing is a real thing, and you engaged in it. Being a person expressing socially undesirable ideas (as you yourself note) makes me a person lacking privilege (in this conversation, at least).
As noted by many sources, it's a privilege to be able to express your ideas without people being reflexively offended and angered by them. As you yourself note, I lack this privilege.
With all due respect, insulting people who lack relative power, and declaring them mentally unfit to run their lives does not make you "a person lacking privilege".
Do not think that you're fooling anybody.
You're deliberately using the language created by the social justice movement in an attempt do discredit it by claiming it applies to yourself in ridiculous situations such as this one. It's embarrassingly transparent.
I fully understand that most adherents to the social justice movement actually don't believe the arguments they make, and simply use them selectively to serve a few special groups or criticize those they consider enemies.
I'm appealing to the arguments directly, not the flawed humans behind them. Are you suggesting the arguments are wrong?
> I fully understand that most adherents to the social justice movement actually don't believe the arguments they make,
At best this is a strawman, at worst you are just completely incorrect. If you truly believe this, you need to broaden your horizon, and maybe interact in good-faith with the people you are trying to ridicule because you refuse to understand their position.
I am not telling you that I think their argument will end up being the correct one, or that you'll end up being wrong. I am telling you that you are debating in bad faith, and without trying to actually have a topic to have a debate about.
> Are you suggesting the arguments are wrong?
I am suggesting you are purposefully misunderstanding and mis-using them, because it suits your world-view.
I am also suggesting that you are using dishonest debate tactics to try and "win" at a debate where there is nothing to win. I do not understand why you had to bring your flawed understanding of what is meant by "privilege" in to this discussion and kind of try and use it against me, when all I did was point out to you, that insulting people isn't very nice.
You, not me, not anyone else, chose to write down on the screen in front of you, an insult and then, when being called out on it ever so gently, chose to start a dishonest, bad-faith debate about "tone policing".
Why you did this, is something that only you can answer.
This story follows a pattern of coordinated attacks on public services in The Guardian and other left leaning media outlets. Usually with the agenda of demanding more money and funding.
No doubt, mistakes happen in large bureaucracies but the story is usually slanted as some evil agency trying to destroy certain 'marginalised' sections of society. Whereas the truth is probably nothing like that.
I cannot help but think it is agenda pushing, distortion of facts and playing on emotions. Read the woman's original article and see the emotional language and phrases used. I think it says a lot about the intent of these media pieces.
Read the linked Centrelinks response and several things are refuted, so why in these comments is there an automatic pile on one side?
I think I can't quite follow your argument. Did you mean that the Guardian is trying to demand funding from someone, and they think they'll get this through this story somehow ? Would you mind explaining ?
> No doubt, mistakes happen in large bureaucracies but the story is usually slanted as some evil agency trying to destroy certain 'marginalised' sections of society. Whereas the truth is probably nothing like that.
The truth is that as an individual, especially one from a marginalized section of society, you are up against a powerful bureaucracy that has the ability to completely screw up your life, by mistake or not. So we as a society depend on holding these bureaucracies to very high standards.
It is also true that in any large bureaucracy, mistakes inevitably happen from time to time. One would wish for a leadership of said bureaucracy to handle these mistakes with integrity and from a position of confidence. By, for example, contacting this women directly, quietly resolving this issue and then adding this problem to the yearly statistics to prove you run a good ship. Who knows, this woman might have written a blog post singing your praises, after you resolved her problem for her. Certainly the better PR strategy.
If, on the other hand, you resolve to attacking your clients in public, violating their privacy rights in the process, then maybe you're too close to running an evil, rather than a responsible agency.
> Read the linked Centrelinks response and several things are refuted, so why in these comments is there an automatic pile on one side?
Did you read the refutation of the refutation as well ? I found the article presents the different viewpoints quite well. Including that this sort of pressure is able to stir up strong emotions.
Well if you read the article they did not attack the client. Compare that with the inflamatory language used in her article such as "Centelink terrorised me", "Terrorised by Centrelink, I began to behave as the bureaucracy saw me: angry, emotional, confused, dependent and idiotic"
Secondly the only additional information released seems to be the actual date of when she seperated from her ex and failed to lodge the change of circumstance which lead to the overpayment. She already stated her break up in the original article.
Also have a look at her other articles in her blog. Poems about "blowjobs" and "Pussy" mixed in with the usual radical feminist nonsense. I thinkwe know exactly where she's coming from.
> Also have a look at her other articles in her blog. Poems about "blowjobs" and "Pussy" mixed in with the usual radical feminist nonsense. I thinkwe know exactly where she's coming from.
No mate, can you please be explicit? It almost reads like you're saying it's OK for someone to have their financial records released by a Government welfare agency if they publish the word 'blowjob' on a blog.
> Ms Fox complained that her problem arose from the fact that she was chased by Centrelink for a debt actually owed by her former de facto partner.
Centrelink rebuttal:
> The agency says Ms Fox's debt [...] arose after she received more FTB than she was entitled to because she under-estimated her family income for that year.
Counter-rebuttal:
> As I outlined in my article, when your ex does not lodge his tax return for a year in which you received the Family Tax Benefit it seems your family income will be classified ‘under-estimated’.
This is easily one of many possible scenarios that is not covered by standard procedures, of which I am sure there exist many every year, but which large bureaucracy are regularly unequipped to deal with, to the point that this behavior is a common trope in popular culture[0].
It's funny when it happens in a movie, but if you're actually on the receiving end of this sort of behavior where no-one listens to your most reasonable requests, takes the time to figure out that some sort of mistake has occurred and generally treats you with disrespect in addition to threaten the financial stability of you and your children, I'd put it to you that it's very human to get extremely frustrated and express that frustration.
You provide an excellent example of this:
> Secondly the only additional information released seems to be the actual date of when she seperated from her ex and failed to lodge the change of circumstance which lead to the overpayment. She already stated her break up in the original article.
You're right in a way, the second article by her doesn't add any significant information and reads a little helpless, because if Centrelink had actually taken her initial complaint, when she went to their offices and the article she wrote, seriously, there would have been no further issue.
Instead they chose to personally attack her. Which is quite different from attacking an organization.
> I thinkwe know exactly where she's coming from.
I don't actually. Would you mind explaining ? Does this play into the Guardian receiving funds somehow ?
Where did they personally attack her? Please provide some quotes from the original article and not the hyperbole in hers.
"scenarios that is not covered by standard procedures" Actually I know people who work in benefits and this is very common. It is entriely up to the claimant to notify the office in change of circumstances and anything else can be considered fraud. Also if you are claiming family benefit then they have every right to ask about your personal circumstances in terms of relationships and if you are living with someone as this determines the amount you can get.
Edit - In her original article she actually admits to ignoring letters from the office. This is a huge mistake.
> Where did they personally attack her? Please provide some quotes from the original article
You chose to ignore my questions, but continue to question me. Have you considered a career in politics ?
I am not going to play the definition game of what constitutes an "attack" with you, but I will state for you again the gist of this issue:
Centrelink released personal information that relates to her financial situation and relationship with Centrelink to the press.
> It is entriely up to the claimant to notify the office in change of circumstances
So she did, for whatever reason, not do that, was unaware that Centrelink wanted money from her, which they only wanted because her ex-husband didn't file taxes. So she tried to correct this tell them, that no she did not owe them any money, rather they should as her ex-husband file their taxes.
That seemed to have been a difficult process, which is common in large bureaucracies, but extremely frustrating, and as is custom when confronted with problems caused by the government, she too took to the free press to vent this frustration. One could say that that's one of the most important functions of a free press.
But instead of calling her up and saying
> So and so, you made this and that mistake, but also we get it, big organization can be annoying to deal with.
they chose to "correct the record" publicly by calling her a liar.
You might think that's a reasonable course of action.
I, on the other hand, think that if criticizing your government leads to them releasing personal data about you to the public, to let you know who's in charge, something isn't right.
I would think criticizing your government without fear of retribution is one of the fundamental features of a democracy.
Precisely because she didn't attack any person specifically, but the organization as a whole.
So, now I attempted to answer your question, and I ask that you return the favor:
What did you mean by the claim that The Guardian et al think they stand to gain in funds from this article?
And also: Why do you think her personal politics, or as you put it "I thinkwe know exactly where she's coming from" matters in this case ?
In the event that this release was illegal, I really do feel for the people at the agency. Someone made public false allegations about them and they are legally forbidden from proving that person wrong. It's a tough position to be in.
I don't have a good solution to this, but I do think that there should be a legal way to prove a person is lying if they directly make accusations about you. After all, they are the one who made the situation public, not you.
In my post, "you" refers to the corporate person that is the Centrelink government agency (and implicitly the humans behind that corporate person), about which false allegations were made.
Is there some meaningful distinction here that means false allegations about an organization of humans should go unrefuted, but false allegations about a single human should be refuted?
> Is there some meaningful distinction here that means false allegations about an organization of humans should go unrefuted, but false allegations about a single human should be refuted?
To me, false allegations against individuals are more serious than false allegations against organizations for a few reasons. First, I care about the well-being of organizations only to the extent they positively impact the well-being of humans (or, to a lesser extent, animals). Second, a single false allegation against an individual human seems to be able to have a much more damaging effect than one against an organization.
I suspect this is a well-worn topic and that I would consider many of the other objections to corporate personhood to be "meaningful distinctions".
In this case, the false allegations were spread with the implicit goal of getting the government to spend more money/resources fixing problems that may not exist. If successful, that would result in a huge amount of waste, which harms real humans.
Even if it were a private organization, such allegations could directly result in harm to the human owners. For example, false allegations about bad food at a restaurant would mean the human owners and employees lose money. In much the same way, false allegations about a human might result in them losing their job.
While all of these are possible and all of these are bad outcomes, I think that their probability of happening and the magnitude of the result is less bad than what would occur if allegations of cruelty or incompetence were made against an individual.
I don't think we're going to be able to settle this argument here, so I'll just leave it at that.
Is there something wrong with the agency making a public statement refuting the allegations, citing the information they have (but without specifics for privacy reasons)? Surely that helps them without their having handed over information?
Centrelink has all sorts of horrible things said about it, and recently in particular they've been doing some pretty unethical things around debt collection. But the thing is that they're a government department full of civil servants. It's their role to implement policy, not to defend government actions - that's for politicians to do. It's not a tough position at all; the correct response is "We don't comment on private matters", and you hear large entities say it every day.
Imagine if the IRS released Trump's tax returns. Trump has been lying about them being held up by the IRS (all those years? seriously? can't release some old ones?), but the IRS refuse to be 'fair about it' because it's a matter of privacy. Even though they're being maligned and it's clearly in the public interest. This Centrelink issue is the exact same thing, except for the clear public interest.
Besides, Centrelink doesn't need a reputation, since they're not selling anything. People go there out of need, not desire.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] thread* Raising awareness amongst non-technical folks that such incredible stocking up of PII can raise complicated ethical risks?
* Giving legislative representatives practical and defensible reasons to not just go with the flow and actually have a chance to offer smart legislative options without being shot down?
This particular example is alarming - I can picture plenty of corporations that wouldn't mind the idea of "customer service" representatives casually raising the prospect of releasing customer PII in order to "show their side of the story" as leverage in situations where a customer is threatening to go to an Ombudsman or other public forum.
The list of wrong things include knowingly issuing pay-us-back-or-we'll-empty-your-bank-account legal notices incorrectly, when they clearly averaged e.g. a single high payment month over the whole period when the rules state this is not to be done. Then saying just call us, knowing the call wait lines are so horrid it is a whole day project just to get in touch with anyone.
I'm so over this government.
https://www.humanservices.gov.au/customer/dhs/centrelink
I see no evidence that Centrelink collects any data on people who don't approach it with their hand out.
Both my sisters work in law enforcement agencies, and tell me that their every action on their computer systems is tracked and logged. Once when my younger sister worked in the Traffic infringement section of the local police department, I asked her to check up if I was actually pinged by a remote speed camera that morning as I suspected I was. She refused, on the grounds that any such searches were tracked, and if it was found she did a search against a vehicle belonging to a close family member, it would trigger an internal investigation by the ethics team.
US anecdote: a product I worked on had a feature which needs full access to a customer's email account to use. The feature scrapes their inbox and can send emails impersonating our customers' staff. I said there was no way I'd use that feature, but it proved to be super popular! People had no problem handing over access to their entire (work) email account to a startup.
Australia anecdote: When my uncle died we needed to hunt down his bank details. The banks (by law) weren't allowed to even tell us if he was one of their customers without seeing his death certificate and our documentation.
I'm now way more nervous about trusting US based startups with my data. Its not just that many of the engineers are inexperienced, and most startups don't have any security expertise. Its also that culturally I know they probably don't understand personal privacy. I can't trust that they'll protect my data if they might not bother protecting their own.
I was extremely surprised to find out that the answer was "at least tens of thousands of people".
Anyway fraudulent bank transactions are relatively easy to undo, and they have really high penalties and are enforced by FBI agents who don't play around.
Banks have been extremely reluctant to hop onboard with APIs. KeyBank wanted to charge me $20/month to turn on a Quickbooks export, for example.
Capital One has a neat ability to generate read-only credentials for use with stuff like Mint. Wish more banks would do that.
The first time I had to do this it solidified my trust in their services.
That way of thinking only works as long as your goals and positions are aligned with the entity collecting information about you to begin with. If they're not, or the situation changes, imbalances of information lead to disadvantages for you pretty quickly.
All it took was some bureaucrat feeling petty.
The second was a tactic often used by the Stasi to create more operatives - call someone in for questioning, accuse them of a crime for which they have no alibi, such as spying, and when they protest their innocence, ask them to help the government with something to show their good faith. That something could easily be to provide a pretext for arresting the real target.
The way it's supposed to work is that you have some public event of importance: a crime, a person applies for a security clearance, or whatnot. Based on that event, the state then conducts and investigation to see if there are any data they can discover that might lead to a response.
The new way of working is that you collect all the data, on everyone, all the time. Then there's no more event. The only thing you do is pick out the person. Once you have the person, it's a simple data mining exercise (along with a lot of interrogation techniques) that takes care of the person. What's the old saying in communist countries? "You have a man. You have a problem. No more man, no more problem"
Functional societies focus on events. Dysfunctional societies focus on the people.
On 31 October, Congress party officials provided assailants with voter lists, school registration forms, and ration lists.[49] The lists were used to find the location of Sikh homes and business, an otherwise impossible task because they were located in unmarked and diverse neighbourhoods. On the night of 31 October, the night before the massacres began, assailants used the lists to mark the houses of Sikhs with letter "S".[49] In addition, because most of the mobs were illiterate, Congress Party officials provided help in reading the lists and leading the mobs to Sikh homes and businesses in the other neighbourhoods.[46] By using the lists the mobs were able to pinpoint the locations of Sikhs they otherwise would have missed.[46]
... One man, Amar Singh, escaped the initial attack on his house by having a Hindu neighbour drag him into his neighbour's house and declare him dead. However, a group of 18 assailants later came looking for his body, and when his neighbour replied that others had already taken away the body an assailant showed him a list and replied, "Look, Amar Singh's name has not been struck off from the list so his dead body has not been taken away."[46]
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_anti-Sikh_riots#Use_of_vo...
"The 1933 census, with design help and tabulation services provided by IBM through its German subsidiary, proved to be pivotal to the Nazis in their efforts to identify, isolate, and ultimately destroy the country's Jewish minority. Machine-tabulated census data greatly expanded the estimated number of Jews in Germany by identifying individuals with only one or a few Jewish ancestors. Previous estimates of 400,000 to 600,000 were abandoned for a new estimate of 2 million Jews in the nation of 65 million.[15]"
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/confirmed-the-us-...
If a person is unable to manage their own life and requires the government to be their parent, it's unclear to me how the bureaucracy can simultaneously manage their life for them and also not keep records.
That snide comment is really uncalled for. I hope you will never be in a situation where you require assistance, government or other.
But to your larger point:
Maybe government and other bureaucracy should strive to collect only that personal data that is strictly necessary for them to function and create a culture in their organization which emphasizes the importance of keeping private data private, and public data public.
I'm not saying that there aren't sometimes conflicts between the two, but in general I would like for this issue to be taken seriously, instead of having to fear my information being used against me for petty reasons by these organisations. Whether I depend on them (which makes this a whole lot more sinister) or not.
Perhaps that conflict doesn't rise to the level that should be necessary to protect privacy, but I think that's at least worth discussing. Is it really productive to prevent government organizations from refuting lies told about them?
That snide comment is really uncalled for. I hope you will never be in a situation where you require assistance, government or other.
I notice that you don't characterize my comment as wrong, you merely criticize the tone.
You should read this great article which explains how tone policing is actually just a silencing tactic used by privileged people to avoid confronting the actual content of a message.
http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/12/tone-policing-and-privil...
Oh, and criticizing tone alongside substantive comments isn't the same as 'a silencing tactic'. Its an effort to keep our forum civil. An actual silencing tactic might look like, calling names like 'privileged people' to shame someone, and redirecting the topic with an irrelevant web link to attempt to look like an authority on discussions like this.
On the opposite side of the world, note all the criticism of "FAKE news" and the desire by many people for large corporations collecting data on billions of people to police it. The reason is that a population which doesn't understand reality cannot effectively make decisions about it.
I called no one privileged and attempted to silence no one. I merely observed that tone policing is not actually an assertion that anything I said was false.
Can you tell me what's "uncivil" about my comment? Would a comment expressing sentiment with opposing mood affiliation also be uncivil?
Thinking that what someone said was false, is not a necessary condition for replying to comments on a message board. I don't know how you ended up thinking that.
> Can you tell me what's "uncivil" about my comment?
Yes, it's uncivil to imply that someone who receives government assistance is basically a child and needs a parent, because they're not fit to run their own lives. There are a myriad of reasons why someone might end up in that position, that have nothing to do with being unable to handle your affairs.
Your original comment started out with a generalizing remark which I felt to be uncivil and I called out out on it.
I didn't actually completely disagree with the rest of your comment. Do you understand this ? You raised a perfectly valid point.
My only disagreement with you is that you decided it is good etiquette to insult a whole group of people by implying they have the real-world capacity of children.
I will repeat it again for you:
* I disagree with what I thought was an insulting remark.
* I thought the points you made afterwards were valid and intriguing
Please do not try to misunderstand me on purpose again.
That said, it is a decent possible that no insult was intended, so I'd suggest we just move on and discuss the content rather than the tone.
Maybe yosamino was tone policing you, but how about this: I'm calling your statement out as being factually wrong. You accuse and malign someone without any evidence, beyond the fact that they were on welfare. Without proof, your assertion is at best an ad hominem attack.
(Unless you dispute this? Perhaps you think Centrelink's data is forged?)
The comment Yosamino attempted to tone police merely asserted that she is unable to manage her life because she is dependent on centrelink, much like I was dependent on my parents for subsistence when I was a child. Is this in dispute? Do you believe she is actually not really in need of welfare, and is actually just taking taxpayer money for the heck of it?
> Is this in dispute?
Yes, and this is in fact mentioned in the article, albeit in a single sentence.
It was not my intention to characterize your comment as wrong, I was expanding on your valid question about how a bureaucracy should deal with data, by giving you my opinion. Are you under the impression that this conversation is about winning ?
In addition, it is disingenuous of you to imply that every one who receives government assistance is basically a child, unable to exist without a parent, and then get all thin-skinned when getting called out on it.
If you want to make needlessly inflammatory remarks, be prepared to deal with the consequences.
In this case the consequence to you was so harmless, that I even took the next sentence you wrote seriously, agreed with you and gave you my opinion.
Closing remark: Don't use concepts like "tone policing" which describe a real thing, that real people experience when they're in a position of inferior power to try and tell me I am a baddie and that you feel bad, from being softly called out for being inflammatory on purpose. It's not the same thing, and it's a bit embarrassing for you.
As noted by many sources, it's a privilege to be able to express your ideas without people being reflexively offended and angered by them. As you yourself note, I lack this privilege.
Do not think that you're fooling anybody.
You're deliberately using the language created by the social justice movement in an attempt do discredit it by claiming it applies to yourself in ridiculous situations such as this one. It's embarrassingly transparent.
I'm appealing to the arguments directly, not the flawed humans behind them. Are you suggesting the arguments are wrong?
At best this is a strawman, at worst you are just completely incorrect. If you truly believe this, you need to broaden your horizon, and maybe interact in good-faith with the people you are trying to ridicule because you refuse to understand their position.
I am not telling you that I think their argument will end up being the correct one, or that you'll end up being wrong. I am telling you that you are debating in bad faith, and without trying to actually have a topic to have a debate about.
> Are you suggesting the arguments are wrong?
I am suggesting you are purposefully misunderstanding and mis-using them, because it suits your world-view.
I am also suggesting that you are using dishonest debate tactics to try and "win" at a debate where there is nothing to win. I do not understand why you had to bring your flawed understanding of what is meant by "privilege" in to this discussion and kind of try and use it against me, when all I did was point out to you, that insulting people isn't very nice.
You, not me, not anyone else, chose to write down on the screen in front of you, an insult and then, when being called out on it ever so gently, chose to start a dishonest, bad-faith debate about "tone policing".
Why you did this, is something that only you can answer.
Good day.
No doubt, mistakes happen in large bureaucracies but the story is usually slanted as some evil agency trying to destroy certain 'marginalised' sections of society. Whereas the truth is probably nothing like that.
I cannot help but think it is agenda pushing, distortion of facts and playing on emotions. Read the woman's original article and see the emotional language and phrases used. I think it says a lot about the intent of these media pieces.
Read the linked Centrelinks response and several things are refuted, so why in these comments is there an automatic pile on one side?
> No doubt, mistakes happen in large bureaucracies but the story is usually slanted as some evil agency trying to destroy certain 'marginalised' sections of society. Whereas the truth is probably nothing like that.
The truth is that as an individual, especially one from a marginalized section of society, you are up against a powerful bureaucracy that has the ability to completely screw up your life, by mistake or not. So we as a society depend on holding these bureaucracies to very high standards.
It is also true that in any large bureaucracy, mistakes inevitably happen from time to time. One would wish for a leadership of said bureaucracy to handle these mistakes with integrity and from a position of confidence. By, for example, contacting this women directly, quietly resolving this issue and then adding this problem to the yearly statistics to prove you run a good ship. Who knows, this woman might have written a blog post singing your praises, after you resolved her problem for her. Certainly the better PR strategy.
If, on the other hand, you resolve to attacking your clients in public, violating their privacy rights in the process, then maybe you're too close to running an evil, rather than a responsible agency.
> Read the linked Centrelinks response and several things are refuted, so why in these comments is there an automatic pile on one side?
Did you read the refutation of the refutation as well ? I found the article presents the different viewpoints quite well. Including that this sort of pressure is able to stir up strong emotions.
Secondly the only additional information released seems to be the actual date of when she seperated from her ex and failed to lodge the change of circumstance which lead to the overpayment. She already stated her break up in the original article.
Also have a look at her other articles in her blog. Poems about "blowjobs" and "Pussy" mixed in with the usual radical feminist nonsense. I thinkwe know exactly where she's coming from.
No mate, can you please be explicit? It almost reads like you're saying it's OK for someone to have their financial records released by a Government welfare agency if they publish the word 'blowjob' on a blog.
> Ms Fox complained that her problem arose from the fact that she was chased by Centrelink for a debt actually owed by her former de facto partner.
Centrelink rebuttal:
> The agency says Ms Fox's debt [...] arose after she received more FTB than she was entitled to because she under-estimated her family income for that year.
Counter-rebuttal:
> As I outlined in my article, when your ex does not lodge his tax return for a year in which you received the Family Tax Benefit it seems your family income will be classified ‘under-estimated’.
This is easily one of many possible scenarios that is not covered by standard procedures, of which I am sure there exist many every year, but which large bureaucracy are regularly unequipped to deal with, to the point that this behavior is a common trope in popular culture[0].
It's funny when it happens in a movie, but if you're actually on the receiving end of this sort of behavior where no-one listens to your most reasonable requests, takes the time to figure out that some sort of mistake has occurred and generally treats you with disrespect in addition to threaten the financial stability of you and your children, I'd put it to you that it's very human to get extremely frustrated and express that frustration.
You provide an excellent example of this:
> Secondly the only additional information released seems to be the actual date of when she seperated from her ex and failed to lodge the change of circumstance which lead to the overpayment. She already stated her break up in the original article.
You're right in a way, the second article by her doesn't add any significant information and reads a little helpless, because if Centrelink had actually taken her initial complaint, when she went to their offices and the article she wrote, seriously, there would have been no further issue.
Instead they chose to personally attack her. Which is quite different from attacking an organization.
> I thinkwe know exactly where she's coming from.
I don't actually. Would you mind explaining ? Does this play into the Guardian receiving funds somehow ?
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GI5kwSap9Ug
"scenarios that is not covered by standard procedures" Actually I know people who work in benefits and this is very common. It is entriely up to the claimant to notify the office in change of circumstances and anything else can be considered fraud. Also if you are claiming family benefit then they have every right to ask about your personal circumstances in terms of relationships and if you are living with someone as this determines the amount you can get.
Edit - In her original article she actually admits to ignoring letters from the office. This is a huge mistake.
You chose to ignore my questions, but continue to question me. Have you considered a career in politics ?
I am not going to play the definition game of what constitutes an "attack" with you, but I will state for you again the gist of this issue:
Centrelink released personal information that relates to her financial situation and relationship with Centrelink to the press.
> It is entriely up to the claimant to notify the office in change of circumstances
So she did, for whatever reason, not do that, was unaware that Centrelink wanted money from her, which they only wanted because her ex-husband didn't file taxes. So she tried to correct this tell them, that no she did not owe them any money, rather they should as her ex-husband file their taxes.
That seemed to have been a difficult process, which is common in large bureaucracies, but extremely frustrating, and as is custom when confronted with problems caused by the government, she too took to the free press to vent this frustration. One could say that that's one of the most important functions of a free press.
But instead of calling her up and saying
> So and so, you made this and that mistake, but also we get it, big organization can be annoying to deal with.
they chose to "correct the record" publicly by calling her a liar.
You might think that's a reasonable course of action.
I, on the other hand, think that if criticizing your government leads to them releasing personal data about you to the public, to let you know who's in charge, something isn't right.
I would think criticizing your government without fear of retribution is one of the fundamental features of a democracy.
Precisely because she didn't attack any person specifically, but the organization as a whole.
So, now I attempted to answer your question, and I ask that you return the favor:
What did you mean by the claim that The Guardian et al think they stand to gain in funds from this article?
And also: Why do you think her personal politics, or as you put it "I thinkwe know exactly where she's coming from" matters in this case ?
I don't have a good solution to this, but I do think that there should be a legal way to prove a person is lying if they directly make accusations about you. After all, they are the one who made the situation public, not you.
"about you"? Her article did not name or provide identifying information about any individual employee of Centrelink.
The relevant section: http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/nsw/consol_act/da200599/s... (This is the New South Wales legislation but it's almost perfectly uniform in all states and territories.)
Is there some meaningful distinction here that means false allegations about an organization of humans should go unrefuted, but false allegations about a single human should be refuted?
To me, false allegations against individuals are more serious than false allegations against organizations for a few reasons. First, I care about the well-being of organizations only to the extent they positively impact the well-being of humans (or, to a lesser extent, animals). Second, a single false allegation against an individual human seems to be able to have a much more damaging effect than one against an organization.
I suspect this is a well-worn topic and that I would consider many of the other objections to corporate personhood to be "meaningful distinctions".
Even if it were a private organization, such allegations could directly result in harm to the human owners. For example, false allegations about bad food at a restaurant would mean the human owners and employees lose money. In much the same way, false allegations about a human might result in them losing their job.
I don't think we're going to be able to settle this argument here, so I'll just leave it at that.
Virtually every PR statement omits detail and evidence that would back up their statements.
Imagine if the IRS released Trump's tax returns. Trump has been lying about them being held up by the IRS (all those years? seriously? can't release some old ones?), but the IRS refuse to be 'fair about it' because it's a matter of privacy. Even though they're being maligned and it's clearly in the public interest. This Centrelink issue is the exact same thing, except for the clear public interest.
Besides, Centrelink doesn't need a reputation, since they're not selling anything. People go there out of need, not desire.