KC Martin-Stone

Some general information for our community about what data our govt holds on you - even before the data matching starts. It’s called PLIDA. PLIDA is the Person Level Integrated Data Asset, run by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. It links government records about almost everyone who has lived in Australia since 2006. Medicare, Centrelink and tax records form the backbone. Each person gets a single ID number, which connects their records across 37 datasets and more than 77,000 variables. Names and street addresses are removed. Location is kept down to small areas, in some tables the mesh block, which can be just a few dozen homes. What's in it (full list attached): - every Medicare claim and PBS script since 2006, and cause of death - Centrelink payments, disability codes, work capacity and rent assistance - tax returns, payroll, super and every property sale - mental health diagnoses from ABS surveys, including suicidality - every NDIS plan, payment, provider, goal, review request and survey answer since 2013, including SDA and SIL funding - aged care records to 2025, including dementia diagnosis dates, home care assessments, respite and entry to residential care - veterans' service and health records - state records from NSW and Victoria covering child protection, police incidents, youth justice, family violence, public housing, homelessness and ambulance callouts - home insurance policies from six major insurers, handed to the ABS Children At 11:30am on Wednesday 23 September, the ABS published details of the Life Course Dataset. It links ACT and SA records to PLIDA: 680,000 ACT health records, 137,000 ACT education records and 1.3 million SA records. These cover births, kindy and Year 7 health checks, NAPLAN, school behaviour management, hospital and emergency visits, mental health, public housing and homelessness. It builds family and household structures, and where a relationship isn't recorded the ABS can estimate it. The ABS wants to add more states and data from community organisations. The 2023 Budget announced and funded this ($16.4 million), and approved researchers have had access since March 2025. Most people have never heard of it. Who can use it Approved researchers from government, universities and policy institutes, inside the ABS DataLab. The ABS says private businesses can't access PLIDA, and the insurers who supply data can't see the linked data. Government employees can. Your data is shared under laws, not with your consent. Then there’s the ChatGPT story. @sama fyi babes:) The day after the ABS release, the Prime Minister revealed that an OpenAI agent got into a Medicare statistics website in June. The government wasn't told until 10 September. The government and OpenAI say no personal records were accessed. The bigger risk sits with the records government itself holds, links and shares, and who it shares them with. Palantir The NDIA shares restricted NDIS participant data with the Fraud Fusion Taskforce, a group of 25 agencies, and with the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC), which uses Palantir. An FOI response from ACIC referred to the process for ingesting a Fraud Fusion Centre dataset into Palantir. The NDIA denies using Palantir itself. Federal agencies have spent an estimated $60 million on Palantir contracts. We have no evidence yet that PLIDA data goes to Palantir but yeahhhh. Breaches we already know about - 2022: CTARS, client software used by NDIS providers, was hacked and sensitive health data leaked. - 2023: the HWL Ebsworth hack affected NDIS participants. - November 2023: an NDIA staff member was charged with allegedly passing participants' names, dates of birth and addresses to two people operating as NDIS providers. Media reported about 11,000 records. The Fraud Fusion Taskforce found it. - September 2026: the Quest Apartment Hotels breach hit nearly two million customers and included NDIS and Medicare numbers. #auspol