The government of the Australian state of Victoria not only decided to deliberately keep citizens in the dark about court rulings exposing the fact the privacy of their data collected by contact tracing apps can be compromised—but is now doubling down.
The state’s Acting Premier Jacinta Allan chose to defend the failure to inform people about matters pertaining to sensitive private information about them by claiming the government was shielding them from misinformation.
Australian media report the attempts to hide the truth have been made repeatedly, and Allan’s logic in defending the move is that if revealed, the Supreme Court’s secret ruling that said the data was not “absolutely protected” would have given rise to a “baseless scare campaign” as media reporting the facts would have caused “fear and misinformation.”
She did not clarify what type of “misinformation and fear” was expected to arise from the truth.
