We wish to thank Phil Rehn who passed on this information from Federal Privacy Commissioner's Office. Please feel free to have a read through it:

SPAM and Your Privacy

Unsolicited commercial emails (UCEs) or spam can be a real problem, obviously, and many people regard it as a serious privacy issue. However, most such emails are not covered by the Privacy Act as it now, stands. The Privacy Act is essentially designed to regulate the use of personal information about particular identifiable individuals, rather than the scattergun approach that spammers use.

One issue is that the Privacy Act regulates the collection, use and disclosure of 'personal information' which the Act defines as information from which the identity of a specific person can be readily determined. As a result, many email addresses do not constitute personal information.

A second issue is that the National Privacy Principles (NPPs) in the Privacy Act, which are the privacy principles that apply in the Australian private sector, do not prevent a business from using personal information for the purpose for w