In yesterday’s mail I received an envelope from New Zealand Post. It purported to contain a survey; six pages of questions requesting information sufficiently personal to be impertinent.

A survey’s a survey, and a survey managed by a state owned enterprise is assumed to be important. But why does New Zealand Post want to know my date of birth, my income, which utility companies I do business with, my mortgage rate and the state of my credit cards? Why are they asking me to supply the same information about my partner?

The company is entirely candid about the reason: they want to make this information available to organisations for targetted advertising. Which means that New Zealand Post is asking me to freely provide this detailed personal information about myself and my partner so it can sell those details to other businesses (for all that it’s government owned, New Zealand Post is not a charity).

Although the purpose is spelt out in the fine print, presenting the six page questionnaire as a survey seems to me to be deceptive. Given New Zealand Post’s official status and the offer of prizes to randomly-chosen participants, many householders will no doubt be persuaded to render up the details being sought, some without reading the fine print, others because the possibility of something for free outweighs any consideration of personal privacy.

New Zealand Post is a large enterprise, and like any large enterprise this initiative would not have been contemplated without a solid firewall of legal advice. The company knows exactly how close to the wind it’s sailing and believes this marketing strategy to be on the right side of law.

But is it?

When opened, the survey looks strikingly similar in appearance to the forms generated by other government departments and official agencies. Without my reading glasses on, the only thing I wouldn’t expect to see on a form from ACC or Inland Revenue is the list of prizes on the front. And it’s only by reading the fine print section below those images that the real nature of this request for information becomes apparent.

Is New Zealand Post’s survey an attempted end-run around existing consumer privacy protections? You’ll have to make up your own mind, but my view is that it shows contempt both for the spirit of existing privacy rulings and for the intelligence of New Zealanders.

That’s not a good look for any business, let alone a state owned enterprise.