OK, let’s get this out of the way – it seems I’ve been wrong TWICE – which makes it more or less right.
Kaindub said:
If the OC is sending notices to the email address and he email address is not on the strata roll, then they breach 178(b) as the email address is not the address for service of notices. Irrespective of the above statement, 178(c) says the email address must be recorded on the strata roll if the owner has one.
What the Act says is that the lot owner must provide “an Australian postal address, and an email address if the holder has one, if not provided as the address for service.”
This is interpreted as meaning that you have to provide a postal address and/or email address if you haven’t provided a different address for service of communications (for instance, through an agent). The Fair Trading website doesn’t spell this out and unhelfully refers to “postal/email addresses”.
However, here is an extract from a Strata Community Australia (the strata managers’ professional body) FAQ:
How do I obtain the phone number/email address/postal address of members of the committee?
Due to privacy laws you only have the legal right to obtain the postal address of lot owners, which you can request from the strata manager, or if the scheme is self-managed, the committee … Records of the committee (which include the postal addresses of lot owners) must be made available for inspection by lot owners.
Now, given that the Act says that strata laws are superseded by all other laws and (I think) privacy is a Federal law, it may well be that what appears to be allowed in strata law, is forbidden in privacy laws.
So I may well have been wrong when I wrote that email addresses weren’t required to be on the strata roll (although it may be that rental agents’ email addresses suffice), but then I was doubly wrong when I said that anything on the strata roll had to be made available to owners.
Do two wrongs make me right? Kind of … but trying to track down the one line of legislation, regulation or tribunal findings that definitively says OCs must not reveal email adresses to owners has proved beyond me, thus far.
However, I did happen upon this web page from the Rockend strata management software website where it shows you how to hide the email addresses on your electronic strata roll. It doesn’t mean it’s legal, but it does suggest it’s not illegal.
Why would email addresses specifically be excluded from the strata roll? Anyone who has ever suffered from spam email clogging up their inbox will testify that it is a modern plague, partly because it costs nothing to send out a million emails – something that will cost serious money using snail mail.
There are also some seriously nasty con artists out there who will, for instance, send you convincing looking emails from your bank or internet service provider asking you to “confirm your details” – or, basically, hand over your credit card numbers, with obvious devastating sonsequences on your finances.
So you can see why privacy issues would be tighter for email addresses on strata rolls. Letting randoms know that you a) own an apartment and b) have an email address is an invitation for all sorts of internet jiggerypokery.
But what if you want to get in touch with other owners (probably for reasons that your committee or strata managers really don’t want you to)?
What is missing from this is a link where you can send an email to a “blind” address that passes on your emails to all owners, so that you can tell them that you think there’s a problem with your committee, strata manager, building manager or whatever. That would get round the problem – but don’t expect it to happen any time soon.
In the meantime, we just have to be thankful for the strata managers, building managers and secretaries who click on cc rather than bcc when they send out group emails.