Privacy and the 2021 Census jayeless.net
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@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.
@jayeless the tax authorities know how much you earn, and probably also religion if religious contributions are deductible 😅
@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