Digital ID Bill 2024: Serious Privacy Concerns Raised for Australians

Author: Ian Aldridge, Progressive Legal

Attention: all Australians.

The proposed new digital ID is, in our legal opinion, extremely concerning from a privacy perspective.

Most Australians don’t understand the serious consequences of the centralisation of all this highly sensitive information of all Australians. It seems to have slipped under everyone’s radar and really hasn’t got the coverage in the media.

The risks in my view vastly outweigh any “convenience” benefits that have been touted and the legislation has been rushed through with only 2 weeks consultation provided!

We need to stop, stop, stop and think about this! We are woefully unprepared for a digital ID in light of the current Privacy Act and before we implement any proposed digital ID, we desperately need our Privacy Law reformed first and arguably a Human Rights Act (in lieu of a Bill of Rights) in this Country.

The EU and US are light years ahead in terms of their privacy laws. We are focusing on the wrong thing here and no digital ID would have prevented the hacks of Medibank, Optus etc. That seems to just be an excuse to push this through quickly.

It isn’t going to stop privacy hacks from happening, if anything it’s going to do the opposite. It will provide more points of entry for hackers (only a password away from all your data) (i.e. a “honeypot”), it will also provide businesses access to the data and provide less security, not more.

Centralisation of data – danger danger Will Robinson!

Even more concerningly, that information will be more easily accessible by the government, Australian Tax Office and police. From a civil liberties and privacy perspective, alarm bells should be ringing.

These are fundamental freedoms we should as individuals be very concerned about handing to the government under the guise of “safety” and “convenience”.

It appears that the service providers for the hardware and software have pushed this very hard and fast but we have not been properly consulted and even with proper safeguards in place (which there doesn’t appear to be at this stage), there is still a very real danger for misuse.

There have been several submissions made by a number of concerned Legal interest groups in opposition to the Bill but largely those concerns have been ignored and it’s been pushed through.

A digital ID, together with a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) would mean that the Government, ATO, Police and even some authorised businesses will be able to track our every movement, all our expenses and spending in real time…!

If that doesn’t scare you as an individual, I don’t know what will.

We need to be very careful with how much power and these individual freedoms we give to the government. Once they are given, it’s almost impossible to retrieve them.

Full article on Lawyer’s Weekly here.