Privacy and the 2021 Census jayeless.net

@jayeless this might just be my dumb socialist leanings having lived in Norway my entire life. But why would you re-count the entire country every X years, when you instead could do it once and have a central registry of where everyone’s home address is? 🤷‍♀️

@hjertnes I don't know, but I suspect if you announced to the Australian people that the Census was now going to be replaced by that, people would be up in arms and make comparisons to Nazi-occupied Europe/the Warsaw Pact countries/modern-day China. On the other hand, though, most Australians do indeed have their names and addresses in centralised databases controlled by their state or territory's road authority 🤷🏻‍♀️ Perhaps it's the separation of that from potentially sensitive data like religion, ethnicity or income that makes the difference.

@hjertnes @jayeless I think it might also be that the census is meant to count everyone who is in the country that night, not just citizens. This includes people like visitors and foreign nationals with the right to work.

@jayeless the tax authorities know how much you earn, and probably also religion if religious contributions are deductible 😅

@lmika our central registry also keeps track of them under a different designation.

@hjertnes True, but the tax office isn't running a side hustle where it sells taxpayers' data off to whatever "partners" they feel like 😅 I think the concern with the Census is that they're collecting information that they don't need for the Census, in order to open up a new revenue stream