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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/09/how-did-you-get-my-number-inside-the-shadowy-world-of-data-brokers-ntwnfb>
"Priya Dev has a clue on how political spam ended up in her inbox during the
2025 federal election campaign.
Like many Australians, Dev endured an unwanted flood of Trumpet of Patriots
text messages – Clive Palmer has admitted to sending 17m of them. But it was
email spam from one of the major political parties that she thought she could
do something about.
Political parties are exempt from privacy law, so they have no obligation to
tell individuals how they find your data, and there is no way to opt out.
But the Australian National University data science academic had a clue: the
emails were addressed to a fake name she had used for online purchases years
ago – a name also used when she received spam from one of the minor political
parties in 2020.
“It looks like it’s come from a transaction,” she says. “It would likely be
some sort of online e-commerce transaction, or energy transaction or something
like that.”
Tracking down how organisations gain access to individual contact information
is “really hard with political parties because they just ignore you,” Dev says.
“If I can find out the origin of my data from this mission, it would be really
amazing.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
