ADMA: Proposed Privacy Act Change Would “Likely Obliterate” All Marketing

ADMA has called for the ban on personal information being used in direct marketing to customers to be repealed.

ADMA, whose CEO is Andrea Martens (lead image) said in its submission to the Privacy Act Review Discussion Paper that direct market had “historically been used with some clarity” but in a digital economy it had become “clouded.”

The body also added that proposal 16.2 in the Discussion paper would “likely obliterate all forms of marketing.”

“At the very least,” the submission continued, “it would be an impractical statement from almost all APP entities. While marketing and targeting to influence behaviour or a purchasing decision is likely a common purpose across all commercial businesses, and would be expected by consumers, it would be a stretch to characterise it to be a “primary purpose” of most organisations.”

Instead, ADMA said a more accurate description of direct marketing would be a “directly related secondary purpose.”

Also on the list of ADMA’s gripes with the proposed changes to the Act was the anonymisation of data.

It had been recommended that personal information be anonymised before it is no longer covered by the Privacy Act.

However, ADMA said that this was based on a “concept of anonymisation that in
practice is likely to be unattainable for many.”

The body went further, suggesting that anonymisation of technical information, including communication metadata, would create “huge” compliance burdens for the industry with “little or no discernible privacy benefit for the consumer.”

It also added that “in practice it cannot be guaranteed that most consumer data is anonymised to the point where over time re-identification is impossible.”

Concerns around the misunderstanding of privacy in its relation to marketing among legislators are nothing new.

IAB Australia’s director of policy and regulatory affairs Sarah Waladan, told B&T that everyone, let alone legislators, is having a hard time keeping abreast of technical innovations.

“Technology is moving so fast, everyone is just trying to keep on top of it. There is a lot of good expertise here and we really need to all work together to think things through properly to make sure whatever we come up with takes into account that technical expertise and balances the law appropriately,” she explained.

“We absolutely need to protect consumer harms and privacy harms but we need to balance the law and get the law right so that we don’t shut down the digital economy in the process.”

ADMA added in its submission that any reforms to the Privacy Act should focus “upon mitigation of risks” without “causing unreasonable costs to businesses as may arise through new regulation.”

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ADMA Privacy Act