Policy · The data profile
Keep the convenience. Keep the choice. A proposal to stop an ordinary purchase or paid membership becoming compulsory permission for unrelated profiling.
This is a campaign proposal for Commonwealth privacy and consumer-law reform. It is not an enacted Act, an introduced parliamentary bill, a regulatory finding or legal advice. Final provisions, coverage, enforcement powers and penalties require specialist drafting and consultation.
Existing. Partial. Missing.
Existing: Australian Privacy Principles already regulate collection, uses, marketing, security and access, with anonymity protections and exceptions.
Partial: separate policies and controls can make it difficult to see what information has been joined or which optional processing a refusal stops.
Proposed addition: clear transaction-level choices, a consolidated profile explanation and an enforceable refusal of optional cross-business profiling. The extent of any gap must be tested against existing law, not assumed.
Who and what the reform would cover
Coverage should follow the activity: joining identifiable customer information across businesses, profiling from those joins, or using stored profiles to shape retail recommendations. It should not depend on a particular company name or a threshold copied from one company’s current record count.
Definitions must distinguish necessary delivery, payment, fraud prevention and lawful record-keeping from optional advertising and profile enrichment. Required identification, safety and legal duties remain.
The Quiet Transaction
Ordinary in-store purchases should not require a loyalty scan, account or contact details unless identification or a record is genuinely required. Online guest checkout should be available where an ongoing account is unnecessary. Receipts should be available without enrolling a shopper in unrelated profiling.
Purpose-limited convenience
A phone number for a receipt should do that job. A delivery address should get the parcel delivered. Using either for optional cross-business enrichment should require a separate, intelligible choice, subject to necessary lawful processing.
The same principle applies to project photos, search inputs and chatbot prompts: explain what is needed to provide the requested service and what optional further use is being proposed.
The No Button
Provide one prominent account-level control to stop optional cross-business matching, profiling and associated advertising disclosures. State what it stops, what must continue for a lawful reason and when the change takes effect.
Using the control should not strip core paid benefits as punishment. Genuine service dependencies and the treatment of personalised discounts need consultation, so the rule is workable rather than a promise that all benefits can exist without their necessary inputs.
See the join
Provide a readable consolidated statement of the brands and sources connected to a person, periods covered, information categories, inferred characteristics, purposes, recipients and retention rules. Include a route to question or correct the record.
This would supplement existing access rights. It is not based on a claim that existing privacy law excludes every inferred opinion.
Data restraint
Keep information only for justified purposes and periods. Optional retrospective cross-business joining should require a separate informed choice, not be silently bundled into a new membership. Records retained for legal, security or dispute obligations need defined exceptions and restricted uses.
Category-specific retention limits should be tested with privacy, operational and consumer experts. A vendor’s present 30-day or 180-day practice is not, by itself, evidence of the correct statutory limit for every retailer.
Human-scale commerce
Disclose when stored personal information or a cross-business profile influences a recommendation. Offer a non-personalised mode based on the current shopping task and retain a practical non-AI route to customer assistance.
The proposal does not assume current assistants use particular shared datasets. Transparency should follow actual use, with auditable records.
Enforcement and remedies
The final proposal should specify which privacy and consumer-law regulator has each power, how the rules interact and how a person seeks correction, cessation, deletion where lawful, or compensation for proven harm.
Penalties must be proportionate to seriousness and scale, with due process and an identified legal basis. Monetary tiers in the working draft are options for consultation, not penalties already in force under this proposal. A new private cause of action would require legislation.
The pathway from Sydenham
Publish the evidence and proposed provisions; seek views from residents, consumer groups, retailers and privacy specialists; revise definitions and compliance costs; then take the proposal to Commonwealth decision-makers. Victorian procurement can separately insist on appropriate data-use and portability conditions where the state contracts for services.
A Victorian candidate can advocate for changes to Commonwealth law. Election to the Victorian Parliament would not itself create these retail privacy rights.
What could change or stop the proposal
Test whether controls genuinely stop optional processing, whether people understand the choices, whether essential services and fraud prevention still work, and whether small businesses can comply. Publish the costs, exceptions and failures as well as the benefits. Reject provisions that create larger harms than they solve.