Why your email address is not for your eyes only

Imagine you’ve noticed a proposal in your strata scheme to spend what you think is too much money on the wrong project or contractor.

You need to get in touch with other owners in a hurry before the decision is made and set in stone.

Snail mail just isn’t going to do it. So you ask your strata manager for a list of owners’ email addresses, but they tell you that it’s their policy not to supply that information, based on the wishes of the majority of their clients.

Frustrating, huh? Your chances of organising the votes to stop the spending are evaporating.

Given the default levels of apathy in most strata schemes, email campaigns are the fastest and most efficient way of alerting other owners to a contentious issue.

On the other hand, how would you feel about your email address being made available to every other owner in your block? Perhaps you don’t want to be assailed by messages concerning issues about which you don’t really care?

But here’s the thing: your strata manager could be breaking the law by not handing over the email addresses. And if they claim privacy laws forbid them from doing so, that's not necessarily true because Commonwealth privacy laws don't apply to strata schemes.

Any strata manager or self-managed scheme that emails owners obviously has their addresses on record. In fact, in NSW strata law demands that unit owners’ email addresses are registered on the strata roll.

And in most states, owners are legally entitled to inspect their strata records, with few exceptions.

Reams of paper

This year, a Flatchatter won an appeal in the West Australian Supreme Court against a tribunal decision that she was allowed to see other owners’ email addresses only provided she didn’t use them to contact owners.

This is a dilemma for strata managers. They want to save the cost, not to mention the environmental carnage, of sending out reams of paper for every notice, bill, agenda and meeting minutes.

But they know that many owners don’t want their email addresses to be available to other owners.

At least one popular strata management software program has a button that obscures email addresses, to keep them from prying eyes, regardless of the viewers’ legal entitlement to see them.

Meanwhile, there’s a push under way to have email addresses excluded from strata roll inspections, under the upcoming reviews of NSW strata laws.

But there’s another side of the “privacy” coin. Maybe your strata committee doesn’t want disgruntled owners stirring each other up with email campaigns. Perhaps they want to be the only ones able to send out “newsletters”, pushing their opinions to the exclusion of everyone else’s.

As a frequent recipient of angry emails, I can understand why the average owner would want to protect themselves from that emotional intrusion into their lives.

Electronic bulletin board

But I can also see the need for getting in touch with other owners quickly and efficiently when there is an issue that could otherwise slip under the radar.

It shouldn’t be that big a deal for those who don’t want to be electronically harangued. You can block messages from selected senders easily, so you need never know you’ve been contacted more than once.

And our laws could allow email addresses to be excluded from strata records, provided an alternative, like an electronic bulletin board, was made freely available to owners. That way, you could choose what to read and from whom.

Communication is the key to building communities and exercising our democratic rights … which may explain why autocrats don’t like too much of it.