@Winston said:
I have sought data from the Web and from reading it conclude that the Owners Corporation AND the Strata Manager would NOT be caught by the Privacy Legislation:
The problem is that you are not a Supreme Court or High Court judge so your opinion is kind of irrelevant (although you are entitled to hold it). I have read the material you posted at considerable length and my conclusion is exactly the opposite. But I am also not a member of the judiciary, so please take that with a pinch of salt too.
However, look at it this way, your strata manager and EC are probably more mindful of the potential for litigation from someone who feels their privacy has been breached, than they are of your perceived “rights” to harvest your neighbours email addresses.
With fines for privacy breaches ranging from $200,000 to $1.7 million (according to THIS website) they may be right to be over-cautious.
Even without those extremes, the sheer waste of time and money involved in defending themselves against an owner whose email address has, for instance, been posted on the internet, and who has then been subject to extreme abuse as a result, is enough to make any strata manager err on the side of caution.
Sooner or later some strata owner will take their strata manager to the Supreme Court to demand access to email addresses and then we will have a definitive ruling. But until that time, you will have to make do with snail mail.
By the way, my building’s former facilities manager twice sent out emails openly copied to all the other owners (rather than BCC-ed). At that point, privacy no longer existed … and it’s one of the reasons he is now our former manager.