Federal Privacy Commissioner Malcolm Crompton has reaffirmed his office's role in the war against spam, despite the federal government's announcement that it is drafting legislation to make spamming a crime.

ZDNet: Some time ago you flagged spam as an area of interest for the office of the federal privacy commissioner. In light of the recent report released by the National Office for the Information Economy and the government's announcement that it's drafting legislation to criminlise it, do you think that it's something that requires your attention anymore?

Definitely. What is interesting about spam is that it sometimes involves pieces of personal information, and sometimes it doesn't depending on how the list is built. Donaldduck@hotmail.com is probably not personal information, except for poor old Donald Duck if he really existed, or a lot of people have got zbczd2t@hotmail.com -- not telling you a lot, and you may have actually put in no other personal information against that address.

Personal information, as defined by the act is ... about an individual who's identity is apparent or can reasonably be attained from the information.

It's actually the elephant emerging through the fog problem. If you're far enough away you probably can't tell that it's an elephant or which elephant it is, but close enough you know exactly how it is. So my office email address... is arguably personal information, but I could have set up a hotmail account, where it's really pretty difficult to ascertain that it's information about me.

ZDNet: So my email address of patrick.gray@zdnet.com.au so, first name and last name and where I work. Is that personal information?

Let's assume that it is personal information.... We haven't got any court rulings on it, but I'm operating on the assumption that it is personal information in the mean time. So that's one vagueness about spam, but the other one is the difference between, say, going into a chatroom, and milking the chatroom for e-mail addresses, versus simply doing a dictionary attack. Now I think it's going to be pretty hard to argue that someone doing a dictionary attack on a hotmail or an AOL or a Yahoo has actually been using personal information, although that could end up with a lot of silk in a very expensive courtroom working that one through.

On the other hand the chatroom stuff may be dealing in personal information. So spam isn't even necessarily about dealing with personal information. Then you have the subset of spamming, where arguably ... personal information is being used or abused, then you've got to come down to 'has that use been against the privacy act or not?' So I would argue -- and I think it's just a statement of the obvious -- that therefore the privacy act is and always has been nothing more and nothing less than an instrument in the war on spam.

ZDNet: Don't you think that role as an instrument in the war against spam is going to be made somewhat obsolete after that legislation passes?

I don't think so... When [Senator Richard] Alston made his statement of the final report on spam and said it'd proceed to legislation we put out a press release at the time saying 'within the resources available we'd be moving on spam'.

The point about that is that... [fighting] spam may involve a multimillion dollar multinational effort. Do you know how big my office is in total? Less than $4 million per annum. So that means that I'm covering the private sector, the credit sector, the public service, conducting investigations, policy development and having the time to talk to you.

Spamming is an amoral activity ... conducted purely on an economic basis. To my mind the way of getting spam is to make it an uneconomic proposition. And spam is essentially an extraordinarily low return per unit, extraordinarily high volume activity. And that makes it delicate -- it doesn't take that much to upset the economics.

Unlike any of the arguments about pornography or inappropriate content, spam by definition is one man's food and another man's poison. You cannot easily define it and hence in law it's very hard to deal with let alone in technology.

You've got to price it out of existence.

ZDNet: It sounds like you've been taking the velvet glove approach. Are we going to see the iron fist of your office come out?

Yes. There are some investigations underway at the moment that may well have to involve us making a determination and heading off to the courts.

Essentially I would much rather celebrate success than condemn failure. I will always work with entities that want to work with me to get things right... that has been more of a success than I expected as an approach.

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