Ticketmaster's online sales violated Alberta privacy law

Ticketmaster Canada broke the law when it required online customers to give personal information for marketing purposes before allowing them to buy tickets, said Alberta's privacy commissioner.

By making that consent a mandatory part of the transaction, the international ticket retailer contravened the Personal Information Protection Act, said areportby the privacy commissioner's office releasedWednesday.

Under the act, Ticketmasteris allowed to takenecessary personal information such asphoneand credit card numbers to carry out a transaction, but the data cannot be passed on for other reasons unrelated to the sale, said the report.

The officebegan an investigation after an Albertan complained he could not buy tickets from Ticketmaster's website unless he agreed to the company's "Use of Personal Information" statement.

The customer was particularly concerned about thecondition allowing Ticketmaster to share the customer's e-mail address and other information with concert promoters, clubs and artists for marketing purposes.

The investigation found Ticketmaster's online privacy policy was "complex and ambiguous," and did not give online customers a reasonable chance to decline or object to the use of their personal information.

"The main recommendation that we came up with was that Ticketmaster develop an opt-out process, so that customers either buying things over the telephone or online could opt out of giving a lot of personal information that would be then shared with other folks," said Wayne Wood, spokesman for the privacy commissioner's office.

Ticketmaster agreed to implement that change for Canadian customers, and has also posted a revised online privacy policy with a more comprehensible table of contents.