HOA BOD exposing personal information

Started by CarolineS3 • 2 replies • 1459 views

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CarolineS3 (Oregon)
Posts: 1

Posted:

I live in a HOA-managed community of 40 homes in Oregon. At least five times now the Board of Directors has sent out emails to the community putting homeowner's personal email addresses in the 'to' line instead of the 'bcc' line thereby exposing everyone's personally identifiable information to everyone else. Each time this has happened I've politely written the Board and asked them to stop this practice, not only as it could potentially cause the HOA legal problems but due to standard privacy practices exposing personal information should be avoided.

Today, they did yet again. The President quickly sent me a follow-up email apologizing for having done it again, but I'm fed up with their lack of care or due diligence in handling homeowner's personal information. Do homeowners have any recourse?

MelissaP1 (Alabama)
Posts: 13,836

Posted:

So you don't want to know who your neighbors or fellow members are? I don't think giving out an email address is that personal information. It's actually controllable if you don't want someone to contact you. I've got a false email address set up for just junk mail or correspondence from certain companies.

If you use your own name in your email address, that's on you. Your the one letting out personal information. There's no law out there that says you have to use a real name or your own name when you create an email address. Why not use "[email protected]"? as the email adress for the HOA to use? It's free to set up and protects your identity.

Your also a member of an association. Your address is no secret nor is your phone number if you have it listed in the phone book. The people who have access to what your considering your "Personal" information can easily walk up to your door or phone you. An email is the least intrusive of any kind of personal information in my opinion...

Former HOA President

BruceF1 (Connecticut)
Posts: 2,535

Posted:

There are laws regarding the safekeeping of certain personally identifiable information, such as dates of birth, social security numbers, bank account and credit card numbers, etc. However, I don't believe email addresses are included.

I simply set up my email account to allow certain mail to get through to my inbox. Everything else gets tagged as junk mail and goes into a separate folder. I can outright reject mail from specific addresses so I never see it. About once or twice a week I go through my junk mail and delete most of it without ever opening it. If something that I'm truly interested in gets into my junk folder, I just forward it to my inbox. I can mark it to always allow mail from that person, or to only allow the mail from that person one time.

Most distribution lists include all recipients in the "To" line.

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