Vanessa Teague reported on a dataset of Medicare and PBS payments that was supposed to be anonymous but wasn’t
A prominent university professor has quit after the health department pressured her university to stop her speaking out about the Medicare and PBS history of over 2.5 million Australians being re-identifiable online due to a government bungle.
In 2016, Vanessa Teague, a cryptographer from the University of Melbourne, and two of her colleagues reported on a dataset, published on an open government data website by the federal government, of 2.5m Australians’ Medicare and PBS payment history dating back to 1984 that had supposedly been de-identified so people were anonymous.
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