Corporate gift australia

As a journalist, I get swamped by hundreds of spares each day. So a few months ago I opened a new email account through a major Australian telecoms operator (not Telstra) exclusively for personal and business correspondence.

For various reasons I didn't use the account for nearly a month, yet the first mail I received at this address was spam. Ever since, I've received on average one spam a day, and all have been telecommunications related.

So it came as no surprise to read that Australian pay-TV provider Foxtel--half-owned by Telstra--had admitted to releasing its list of customers to marketing companies. The details only emerged because the Privacy Commission asked how telemarketing companies knew the name and phone number of a woman customer whose number was supposed to be "silent" for security reasons.

The telemarketer had admitted that Foxtel was the source, and a Foxtel spokeswoman later said the silent number was released "due to human error [since] the customer's original opt-out request was not recorded."

That's pretty hard to reconcile with the company's privacy policy that states: "Foxtel will not sell, rent or trade your personal information."

The corporate affairs manager insists that they don't "sell information to unrelated businesses to promote products unrelated to Foxtel," and Telstra, News Corporation and PBL have all pleaded innocence. Both News Corp and PBL say they haven't accesses the Foxtel subscriber list at all.

However, we have the right to be curious since Telstra's subsidiary Sensis (the old telephone directory service) provides services to telemarketers, and PBL has interests in Acxiom, a global company that provides market-research, customer listing and profiling, general business intelligence, and database marketing and warehousing services.

It would be amazing indeed if these organizations haven't shown some interest in the Foxtel-Telstra subscriber database.

Open access

The devil, of course, is always in the detail, and the truth is possibly hidden behind some of the slippery words used in the documents and claims. For instance, the corporate affairs manager says Foxtel only allows its owners to "use this information to provide promotional and marketing information."

But how would Foxtel know? Clearly the associates have the right to access this data if they wish, but how is their usage policed?

The Australian Privacy Commissioner says that organizations "ordinarily cannot disclose the information for another unrelated purpose without the consent of the individual." But what does "unrelated" mean? And, does the organizational definition of "Telstra" include the subsidiary "Sensis"?

So the potential is here, even if this loophole has not been exploited. And all three of these partners in Foxtel are gigantic, multi-business conglomerates with interests in everything from print and broadcast media to casinos to telemarketing.

In fact, many of these firms are so large and diverse that, for all I know, they may have offshoots of subsidiaries that run online gift shops and flower delivery services. I've been a close watcher of Telstra for years, and I keep stumbling across weird small businesses they bought in the dot-com boom.

So it is difficult for anyone to define the practical and legal limits of such personal information exchange--especially if lists can change hands between subsidiaries or consortia partners without cost, or if one part of the conglomerate business provides marketing services to another.

The fact is that the potential for internal trafficking of data between companies in consortia and within the member companies themselves defeats the whole purpose of having a privacy opt-out clause in contracts--other than to give customers a false sense of security. It also clearly flouts the spirit of any privacy legislation containing enough flexibility to permit internal use of personal and confidential data other than for the specific service provided.

Telecommunications and media are by nature "commons"--and the tragedy of all commons comes about when individuals exploit shared resources by pushing the limits of rules and regulations.

So these are not commercial areas where legislation can be vague and the policing lax, since commons-markets can't effectively self-regulate for long. Eventually governments need to take draconian action.

Stewart Fist (fist@ozemail.com.au) is an Australia-based, award-winning journalist and columnist, and author of The Informatics Handbook