This law makes it illegal for companies to collect third-party data to profile you. But they do anyway.
When you purchase a product or service from a company, fill out an online form, or sign up for a newsletter, you might provide only the necessary data such as your name, email, delivery address and/or payment information.
That company may then turn to other retailers or data brokers to purchase or exchange extra data about you. This could include your age, family, health, habits and more.
This allows them to build a more detailed individual profile on you, which helps them predict your behaviour and more precisely target you with ads.
For almost ten years, there has been a law in Australia that makes this kind of data enrichment illegal if a company can “reasonably and practicably” request that information directly from the consumer. And at least one major data broker has asked the government to “remove” this law.
The burning question is: why is there not a single published case of this law being enforced against companies “enriching” customer data for profiling and targeting purposes?