Claims on Australian Government: Home Affairs to have breached migrants personal details
By MYBRANDBOOK
The Australian government is facing criticism after its home affairs department left the personal details of over 774,000 existing and would-be migrants exposed online. As per a news report, the country’s SkillsSelect digital platform made it all too easy to filter down expressions of interest (that is, people intending to migrate) to see sensitive details like age, birth country, marital status, qualifications and the outcome of an application. One can learn a significant amount about someone’s personal life if they have a vague idea of who they were looking for.
The employment department took SkillsSelect offline for “maintenance” soon after a newspaper got in touch, but it’s not clear when the migrant tool might come back. Officials may be in trouble in the meantime, though, as they’re required to notify both the privacy commissioner and victims.
The timing is unfortunate, at least. Australia recently launched its COVID-19 contact tracing app with privacy concerns of its own. Although SkillsSelect was developed separately, this incident risks eroding trust right at a time when the Australian government needs millions of people to download its COVID-19 app and track the spread of the disease.
Anna Johnston, the Principal of Salinger Privacy, said Australia’s breach notification scheme requires Australian government agencies to notify the privacy commissioner and affected individuals, of any data breach which is “likely to result in serious harm”.
“A failure to notify an eligible data breach can be grounds for a person to make a complaint or for the [office of the information commissioner] to issue a penalty,” she said.
The employment department said it merely “supports [the department of home affairs] by delivering the IT solutions for this program”.
“In line with the Australian government public data policy statement, [the departments] collaborated in early 2020 to make available a report which informs the public about the take-up and general characteristics of applications received through the SkillSelect program.
“This report does not display any personal information and focuses primarily on the number of applications received by each occupation code and geographic region.”
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