When census takers come calling, truth gets complicated |
Indonesia’s economic census is meant to produce a snapshot of the nation, but distrust of officials and fears about privacy may blur the picture.
The Indonesian government is trying to collect and analyse data from 288 million people, many of whom are reluctant to help the Central Statistics Bureau and its 18,000 staff know about their lives.
Although there are laws to protect privacy, the word on the street is that officials can’t be trusted to keep secrets. Confidentiality should be a certainty, but it’s often treated as an option, not a compulsion.
In Indonesia, an individual’s choice of one of six religious faiths approved by the government is stamped on their ID card with a photo. This gets used for almost all transactions with government agencies, plus a raft of private outfits like banks and hotels that keep photocopies of the plastic.
This approved intrusion almost happened in Australia. In 1985, PM Bob Hawke proposed an ID system he called the ‘Australia Card’, allegedly to stamp out welfare fraud and tax evasion. Renamed the ‘Snoop Card’, the idea was sunk by public outcries and a Senate that harkened to the noise.
Little has changed in the past four decades. In 2023, a government report showed that:
just under half of Australians surveyed told us they were affected by a data breach in the previous year, and three-quarters experienced harm as a result.The advent of technologies like artificial intelligence and facial recognition has introduced the........