Submission – Privacy reform – Consultation on Exposure Draft legislation

The Super Members Council welcomes the opportunity to respond to the Attorney-General’s consultation on privacy reforms. Harmful lead-generation models show how privacy failures can become devastating consumer harm. In the Shield and First Guardian scandal, more than 12,000 Australians lost around $1.2 billion of their retirement savings. This was not just a failure at the point financial advice was issued. The catastrophic harm began when the victims’ personal information was harvested, shared and sold, and used to profile and draw people into engineered sales funnels that put their life savings at risk. Lead generation (collecting information about prospective consumers and then converting it into commercial leads) and using or selling those leads to target people for financial products or services was central to the sales funnels that caused this harm. Stronger privacy protections are therefore an important preventive safeguard, particularly where personal information is collected, disclosed or used to target consumers with financial services marketing, and this is the basis for SMC’s submission. While this consultation necessarily addresses data collection, sharing and trading across the economy, SMC’s submission focuses on how these practices operate in superannuation, financial advice and related financial services. It identifies where the proposed reforms could better prevent harmful data-driven sales funnels, while recognising that some of the risks created by lead generation models require major and substantive reform through the Treasury portfolio, not exclusively through Privacy Act reform.