Dev.SN

Australia's Asylum-Seeker Database Leaked

posted by Dopefish on Friday February 21 2014, @04:00PM   
from the another-nope-from-down-under dept.

RobotMonster writes:

"The Guardian reports that a vast database containing the full names, nationalities, location, arrival date, and boat arrival information for a third of all asylum seekers held in Australia -- almost 10,000 adults and children -- had been inadvertently released by the Department of Immigration and Border Protection in one of the most serious privacy breaches in Australia's history.

The disclosure of the database is a major embarrassment for the federal government, which has adopted a policy of extreme secrecy on asylum-seeker issues. As the department is likely to have breached Australia's privacy laws, it will be interesting to see what the repercussions are for the people who should be held responsible."

• Re:One of the most? (Score: 1) by Foobar Bazbot on Saturday February 22 2014, @12:35AM

  by Foobar Bazbot (37) on Saturday February 22 2014, @12:35AM (#4687)

  I don't understand why you'd suggest that when they say "one of the most serious foo", they mean "one of the few serious foo". Those are two different statements that say different things; to say "one of the most serious" suggests a distribution of foos over a continuum of seriousness, and asserts that the foo under discussion is in the upper tail of that distribution. To say "one of the few serious", OTOH, suggests that we may categorize foos as serious or non-serious (this boolean seriousness may be natural or may reflect a discretization of an underlying continuum of seriousness), that most foos are not serious, but the foo under discussion is.

  So in the case where many or most foos are serious, but this foo is even more serious than most, saying "one of the most serious foo" is correct, but saying "one of the few serious foo" is wrong, because serious foo aren't few at all.

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