Technology expert Dr Suelette Dreyfus has expressed concerns about the online census process after the website designed to take people's information crashed on Tuesday night.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics shut down the site after a series of "distributed denial of service", or DDOS, events, which occurs when multiple users flood the resources of a targeted system.
The minister responsible for the census Michael McCormack now says these weren't attacks, or hacks, but an attempt to frustrate the collection of data from millions of Australians taking part in the online survey.
Dr Dreyfus, a lecturer in the Department of Computing and Information Systems at The University of Melbourne, said there were many questions remaining about what actually happened, and that the government needed to provide more clarity.
“When you actually look at this media conference, they seem to be contradicting each other," she said.
"On the one hand they’re saying it’s not an attack, and on the other hand they’re saying 'we shut everything down because we were under attack'.
“It would appear that there is a contradiction to what they’re saying, which does raise questions about how much confidence we can have.
"The public are owed transparency on this."
Dr Dreyfus said people giving over personal information deserved to have assurance that it would be kept safe.
“If you’re giving very private information about yourself, that is supposed to be kept private, you’d like to have a very high degree of confidence in the people who are going to keep that," she said.
“This has been such a debacle. From the moment that they refused to listen to the privacy concerns raised by seven senators or both sides of the political fence.
"They brushed those real privacy concerns aside and then they were heavy-handed in threatening legal action against people who didn’t want to provide their name and address because it’s not statistically relevant information."
She said a possible solution may have been to make the use of an online census purely voluntary.
"They need to make statistical requests that are not relevant, such as your name or street address voluntary," she said.
"They also need to introduce a community consultation board that involves genuine privacy experts and technical experts. Not just to go through the motions, but to engage with the public."
-With AAP
