All smart card promoters should be licensed operators. The licensing requirements could be monitored by an established body such as the Reserve Bank of Australia. This may initially include a prohibition on non-supervised organisations issuing stored value cards. In addition, Australian companies will soon find they have to comply with European privacy legislation in order to trade in information with European companies. This will be an added incentive for the introduction of privacy and data protection legislation, with both public and private sector jurisdiction, in New South Wales and other states.
Some people regard receiving junk mail as an invasion of their privacy.
Ultimately community attitudes must determine what should be considered private to the individual, business or government. The issue is far too important to be left to any one person or interest group to decide. As technology keeps gaining momentum, we're running out of time to get that debate going. Australia's first experiment with a new smart card is as good an excuse as we'll ever get to express our expectations and voice our fears. The same technology that allows a shopper the convenience of directly debiting a bank account, allows the retailer to record that consumer's purchasing preferences for direct marketing purposes.