Recently I visited my local Amcal pharmacy. When I was waiting to pay I noticed a large pile of cards on the country, they were customer loyalty cards with the names of customers printed on them. Also on the top of the pile was a Medicare card. The cards were placed face-down presumably to avoid customers seeing them, but as they were on the counter where customers waited to pay there was nothing to prevent a customer from turning them over or even stealing them.
I brought this to the attention of an Amcal employee who agreed that the medicare card should not have been there (such carelessness is probably illegal) but who thought that a huge pile of customer loyalty cards (which among other things is connected to a database entry with the customer’s phone number and postal address) is something that should be left within reach of customers. When I left the store another customer was being served within convenient reach of the card pile (which may have contained more Medicare cards).
If you have a cold then it’s OK to go to Amcal to buy your medicine. If you have the clap then you might want to go somewhere else as they don’t seem to care much about privacy.
Wait until the smart card or Aussie ID card (or whatever innocent-sounding name our politicians give it) is introduced. All your medical records, taxation records, police records, Centrelink records, etc will then be available to every nosey burreaucrat in the country.
Ah! Will the privacy provisions will take care of that ? Not likely! If the information is there in one place it will be used and abused by hackers, bureaucrats and politicians. Anyone who beleives otherwise must believe in the tooth fairy.
I agree that the government plans for a national ID card (essentially a passport needed for travel within Australia) are a really bad idea.
However that’s entirely separate from the issue of companies such as Amcal demonstrating no concern for privacy at all.
the smart card will contain name , dob., education details , medical and police records , tax , immgration and religous info as well oh and ur address 1 finger print and eye scan thats only the start, you will then have to give it too banks to access or open an account , real estate agents to rent a place ,airlines and bus and train tickets (for domestic travelthey can then know where you have been or going , you will need it to get treament at the chemist or hospital as well and your employer will need it before you start work , then there is the issue of all your details on the card going to overseas databases as well , so ill just use flcuxcard.com for my fake id for the time being, we already are a ploice state similar to nazi germany in the early 1930 s