The cock up that the Inland Revenue Department has engineered gives us a good insight into how the public service is run. 

They hand my information, and yours, over to Google and Facebook etc, and they do this so they can better tailor their advertising. 

Even at this point there are a couple of large red flags. 

Firstly, I would argue there is a patriotic duty for all Government funded agencies to at least pause and ask themselves, given the relationship with social media and the local media and ripping off of locally created content and making money from it, whether the Government should be throwing more money at them, while at the same time allegedly trying to cut some sort of revenue deal where the international players come to the table and actually pay for the content they are ripping off. 

Secondly, and more importantly, the info the IRD have has been gained by compulsion. We have no choice but to hand over our details to them. At what point did they gain the right to on sell them to another party, far less an international one? 

An international one that, as the record shows in multiple jurisdictions, has not a lot of interest in behaving in a way that doesn’t attract an outsized amount of attention to their ways of doing business. 

From America to Europe to Britain - how many times have these players been called before committees and tribunals and inquires to answer questions about their practices, records, business approach, revenue generation and general omnipresence in people's lives? 

IRD will tell you our details are safe and the names, ages and serial numbers are confidential. They have been 'hashed', I think the term is. That’s where they take letters and turn them into numbers and keys. But have they? Are they really? 

Now people, especially those on social media, give a lot of themselves away without often even realising it. 

But the IRD are different. We had no choice. We weren't asked. We didn’t give permission. 

That needs to be addressed.