A survey of community attitudes towards the use of public data held by Governments has found support for using the data to determine who should receive assistance and to crackdown on those who should not.
It also found a lack of confidence that the data would not be hacked.
Conducted by the Australian National University (ANU), the survey, Public Attitudes Towards Data Governance in Australia, found nearly 90 per cent of respondents thought Governments ‘definitely should’ or ‘probably should’ use the data they accessed to ‘ensure residents aren’t claiming benefits they’re not entitled to’.
Similarly, more than 90 per cent of respondents believed data should be used by Governments to ensure residents weren’t missing out on entitlements and to target resources to those who needed it most.
Lead researcher, Nicholas Biddle said there were much lower levels of support for Governments sharing data with researchers to improve Government services.
“In general, respondents to the survey were quite supportive of the Australian Government using data for entitlement and resources allocation, but they were slightly less certain about providing data for researchers,” Associate Professor Biddle said.
“Only 31-to-32 per cent said the Government ‘definitely should’ be able to provide data for this purpose, but overall support for this activity was around 85 per cent.”
The ANUPoll also found there was a low level of trust in Governments’ ability to respond to, or prevent, a data breach.
“Less than 40 per cent of Australians believe the Australian Government can be trusted to use data responsibly, with even fewer people believing the Government will able to respond quickly and effectively to a data breach,” Associate Professor Biddle said.
“It’s unclear from the survey results whether the low level of trust is driven by a lack of knowledge about what Government does or does not do with data, as opposed to a lack of support,” he said.
“It is probably a combination of both for different individuals.”
The 10-page survey report can be accessed at this PS News link.
