Got my letter in the mail today, doesn't seem that long ago that we had the last one...

Census date is 11th of August if you haven't gotten the letter yet.

I note they're definitely trying to spread the load this time by highlighting you can do it as soon as you get the letter rather than waiting for the actual date. Smarter move - albeit less amusing - than everyone doing it on the night, crashing the servers, and the ABS claiming it was a DDoS attack (I mean most of the country accessing your server does fit the definition, but they asked for it).

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[–] [S] 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

You'll just have to choose between whether you want to be potentially identifiable or whether you want to make it known that there is a certain percentage of people with your specific circumstances/situation (who might need particular services, or be likely to vote for particular policies).

If you're unique enough to be obvious from a postcode and census answers then I don't really see how you can definitively avoid identification without removing potentially useful data (i.e. you'd have to remove/generalise questions or move to a higher level location category). It's a bit of a balancing act as evidenced in this thread with you worried about specificity while ada wants to narrow things down even more.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    I stopped answering these things accurately when they left them tagged with your details.

    If you want vulnerable people to fill out forms accurately you've gotta make sure that said forms can't be used to round them up when the political winds blow the other way or an occupying force takes over. Governments keep records for a very long time and censuses have a history of being used for violence.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    This comment includes the core issues that concern me.

    I struggle with the assertion that the data is used for government decisions that benefit me. I'm sure they are to an extent, but the extent to which the data is used in this way is infinitessimal to what's implied in the census marketing IMO. For example, a decision about funding a local school or hospital will be based on data from local schools and hospitals, not from a census. A new school is not going to be built in my area because I indicate that I have 2 kids in my home.

    I don't really "trust" anyone with my sensitive data but I trust government departments less than most. It's likely that at some point Australia will have a PM elected on a populist anti-immigration platform. I believe that the likelihood that census data will be weaponised against migrants is a near certainty. I understand that there are legislative protections against this, but we've seen time and again that these protections are ineffective both at home and abroad.

    Re-idenfication of de-identified data is only one of many concerns, but you do not need to be "unique enough to be obvious" to be re-identified. It's a bit like fingerprinting on the web. With a handful of datapoints you can filter a set of many million down to one or two. You don't really start with a list of names and the census data and merge the two together. It's more like, you start with someone's tax return and the census data, and then you discover a whole lot more about them.

    In summary, the benefits of completing the census just don't seem to stack up against the risks. Perhaps they did 40 years ago when it was a handful of questions about language ability and earnings capacity, but not in 2026.

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