this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
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To be clear, I don't refuse to provide my Day and Month of Birth, simply because I don't want to be some kind of privacy pariah.
That said, while it may have been a reasonable point of ID in the 90s, I don't believe that remains the case in 2024.
The basic concept of Australian Privacy Legislation is that organisations ought to collect only that information which they require, and they should disclose the reason why they are collecting that data.
If the only reason to collect ones Day and Month of birth is so I can repeat it back and confirm it later then that seems very pointless to me. There are other details which they do require which can be used to confirm my identity.
It's useful for quickly disambiguating between multiple people with the same name though - the odds that two people with the same name and date of birth are using the same provider on the same day are low enough to consider it useful.
I'm certain that fewer than 0.1% of patients at a small medical clinic would share the same first and last names. In those cases, you could differentiate by address and age if necessary.
I think you underestimate how common the most common first and last names are. In an even small city you are likely to see repeats of the most common names.
Does that really matter?
Differentiate some other way.
Yes, uniquely identifying the patient is important, especially for pharmacies where people with the same name might receive different doses of the same drug or receive similar sounding drugs that the patient might not catch.
What would you suggest? It needs to be a piece of information that is probably unique when paired with name at least as far as the local area, that absolutely everyone has, that the pharmacy and doctor both have and is unlikely to change (to avoid issues where records in one place are updated before the other).