The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) says that the eCensus has the potential to improve data collection, especially where collectors face challenges in collecting completed forms, such as in secure apartment buildings or in rural Australia.
Ultimately, the bureau claims, an efficient collection method leads to faster processing of Census information and this means communities and decision-makers have access to the results earlier.
The bureau is deploying encryption technology to ensure that transmission of information is secure. It involves two keys; a public one to encode data and a private one to decode the data.
eCensus data sent over the internet is encoded using the public key but can only be decoded by the private key, which remains confidential to the ABS. Without the private key the data is unreadable. This means that eCensus data sent to the ABS via the internet is not able to be read by anyone other than the ABS and the person who entered it.
On August 9, 2006, the ABS reported that over 563,000 eCensus forms had been submitted.
