Under the heading 'Database alerts landlord when tenants consider moving' the ABC notes a service -
offered by the database company TICA [that] involves the company sending an email alert to an agent if a tenant submits an application for another property.TICA reportedly explained that it is "merely protecting agents and landlords from being left in the lurch", standing "up for the rights of landlords and real estate agents". Let's not let any concerns regarding privacy get in the way of those rights.
The ABC states that -
TICA's website states that: "Tenants do not deserve the right to impose their habits on innocent landlords by claiming that housing is a human right."Unsurprisingly, not everyone embraces the vision of the database company - such a benign label, nu - as a public benefactor. Chris Martin of the Tenants Union of New South Wales is reported as charaterising the service as "a gross invasion of privacy", with a "really very high" potential for abuse.
When an individual rents a property, the website states they should regard themselves as privileged, as they were chosen over another applicant. They should not go out of their way to impact financial hardship on landlords and become a property manager's nightmare.
With that in mind, the company has devised a new product, Virtual Manager, which allows landlords and agents to see when a tenant applies for another property.
TICA managing director Philip Nounis says the service has been designed to cater for that small section of the marketplace that does "the dreaded midnight skip and things like that".
"They break their existing agreement. They apply to another property. They don't tell the new agent who they were previously renting through and they get approved without the new agent knowing how much money they previously owe," he said.
We might note TICA's history of controversy, with the Federal Privacy Commissioner in 2004 noting that TICA had breached the Privacy Act and ordering TICA to rectify its information handling practices. As one indication of concerns regarding practice, the Commissioner indicated that TICA took 6 minutes at $5.45 per minute in calls to identify whether it held information on individuals, which elsewhere I have suggested is arguably in conflict with expectations that tenancy history records are accessible for a reasonable fee, up to date and otherwise accurate. [TICA may, of course, now be the embodiment of privacy best practice.]
The Tenants' Union of Queensland at that time argued that -
the exceptional number of breaches supports our view that many of TICA's practices were unlawful. It is an outrage that this behaviour has been able to continue for so many years, unfairly disadvantaging many people from accessing housing - a necessity of life. ... People were being listed inaccurately because TICA did not have adequate processes for verifying data and used overlapping listing categories. Tenants were then charged outrageous amounts if they rang TICA to find out if they were listed - $5.45 per minute, equivalent to $327 per hour. In some cases tenants could be listed for the terms of their natural lives and never get off the database.In responding to the current criticismsTICA is reported as claiming that 'the tenants union is barking up the wrong tree' -
This is just another thing for the tenancy union to complain about ...Copping a certain amount of criticism comes with the territory when implementing problematical new profiling services.
What the tenancy union should be doing is going out there with an education process for tenants, explaining to tenants the benefits of doing the right thing, paying the rent on time rather than trying to jump up and down and complain about databases and certainly complain about TICA.
Broader questions about tenancy data services are discussed in the 84 page Report on Residential Tenancy Databases [PDF] from 2006 by the Residential Tenancy Database Working Party of the Ministerial Council on Consumer Afffairs and Standing Committee of Attorneys-General.
It notes, among things, the suggestion that -
a factor contributing to the growth of tenancy databases was the introduction of restrictions under part IIIA of the Commonwealth Privacy Act 1988, which prohibited real estate agents from accessing the credit history of individuals through credit databases.
