this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
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Day and Month of Birth is a basic check to see if you are who you say you are, if you are refusing to give even basic details like that I can see why the medical staff who deal with you would give you confused/annoyed expressions
Well, yea, but we shouldn't use it for that either.
Google found my day and month of birth in about 3 seconds, and it's entirely because of this "collect everything" behavior.
Same with social security numbers. I’ve lost count of all the sites I’ve had to enter it in over the years, at this point I just assume all of my info is available to a motivated search
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.
This falls into a "if it aint broke, dont fix it" kind of thing. Month and Year Birthdate are fairly low privacy info that everyone remembers and are used to giving out" it gets used for so many different checks because we all have the understanding that we give this info out to businesses that need them, switching to other things that in a vacuum would be a better fit in that one specific category in only a tiny amount just isnt worth the confusion and pushback that changing it would cause.
It is broken though.
You only feel like DoB is low level personal information because you tell it to everyone. According to Australian Provacy Principles it's "sensitive" which means it should only be collected when required.
At my podiatrists office it's simply not required.
And EVERYONE has told it to everyone for generations now, which MAKES it low level. This is not a battle worth fighting as it was lost before your grandparents were born and there are numerous other ways we could make society better that would have a lot more impact than your dentist no longer asking what year you were born
Just because a thing has been done in the past does not mean it should be done in the future.
It's also not a "battle". It's not like stopping use of plastic or whatever. Clinics cpuld just stop collecting DoB and use some other attribute.
Or they could just continue doing what works for them and change nothing because almost no one cares because its not worth caring about. When you were born reveals literally nothing else about you
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).
Which other identifiers would you feel comfortable confirming? Is there a reason you think DoB is dangerous to share?
DoB is considered sensitive personal information in the Australian Privacy Act.
Other identifiers might be street number or last three digits of phone number.
Interesting. Asking because I work in a hospital (in America tho) and making our patients more comfortable is better for everyone. We do serve a lot of homeless people tho, so for that we would probably still need to ask DoB since we need to verify two identifiers.
Firstly, I'm a weirdo and my preferences aren't indicative of "what makes people comfortable" generally.
Secondly, in some cases DoB is really just a code number. Over the last year I've started providing an incorrect DoB at new clinics I attend. It's never caused any problems. As long as I can provide the right code number when asked it has served its purpose.
When I donate blood, they ask me for that info like 3 or 4 times throughout the process. While it probably doesn't apply to a regular doctors visit, I think it's also used to gauge if you are alert and your memory is good.