[devurandom_]

The power corporations are accumulating with information on intimate customer behavior and the glacial response of society to this is a daily refrain on HN. Has anyone seen a comprehensive, or at least collected, list of canonical examples of strong arguments for:

* Raising awareness amongst non-technical folks that such incredible stocking up of PII can raise complicated ethical risks?

* Giving legislative representatives practical and defensible reasons to not just go with the flow and actually have a chance to offer smart legislative options without being shot down?

This particular example is alarming - I can picture plenty of corporations that wouldn't mind the idea of "customer service" representatives casually raising the prospect of releasing customer PII in order to "show their side of the story" as leverage in situations where a customer is threatening to go to an Ombudsman or other public forum.

[sundvor]

On top of all the complete and utterly ... WRONG ... things that Centrelink have been doing lately, a billion dollar entity attacking a single, disadvantaged person furthers the depths of the inethical behaviours at display by the Australian government.

The list of wrong things include knowingly issuing pay-us-back-or-we'll-empty-your-bank-account legal notices incorrectly, when they clearly averaged e.g. a single high payment month over the whole period when the rules state this is not to be done. Then saying just call us, knowing the call wait lines are so horrid it is a whole day project just to get in touch with anyone.

I'm so over this government.

[yummyfajitas]

In this case, it's actually a government agency accumulating data on people who voluntarily choose to collect free money/free stuff from said agency.

https://www.humanservices.gov.au/customer/dhs/centrelink

I see no evidence that Centrelink collects any data on people who don't approach it with their hand out.

[tankenmate]

Centrelink is a government body; it is the public facing segment of the federal social security system in Australia.