The Fair Trading act gives you a lot of rights and ensures that if something doesn't work or isn't what was advertised then you can demand that the vendor put it right or return your money.

But on the Internet, such protections are not always applicable.

Readers Say The group was very clear - Dylan Personally I dont care if - Eelko A useful piece of info is - Colin Have Your Say

I refer of course to the case where you purchase directly from an overseas company -- in such cases the Fair Trading Act will be of no use to you because it only applies to NZ companies and sales transacted within our borders.

A surprising number of Kiwis have already been caught out by this limitation of the Act's power when they have purchased products advertised on TV by way of those irritating infomercials. What you see is not always what you get -- and some companies and products are Australian-based, even though they have an NZ 0800 number and are happy to give the impression that they're NZ-based.

A good example of this is 4 Danoz Direct, a company which has promoted all manner of evil gadgets, including a series of rather nasty sounding 4 mother-pluckers designed to rip the hair from the most sensitive parts of your body with great ease and at speed (owch!).

While I'm not suggesting that Danoz Direct is anything other than a fine retailer, I am making the point that sometimes, on TV and on the Internet, things are not always what you think they are and you may be dealing with a vendor for whom the Fair Trading act does not apply.

Fortunately, if prodded hard enough, your credit card company might be prepared to offer a charge-back should the goods you ordered not arrive -- but if you order a new disk drive, modem, or some other item, only to find that it is faulty or "slightly different" to that which was advertised then you might be up the creek without a virtual paddle.

So... with the NZ dollar reaching a new all-time low against the US$ yesterday, and the added protection that purchasing locally offers, does it make sense to buy from foreign suppliers over the Net right now -- or should we be supporting our local e-tail sites?

A Reverse Lookup Online Phone Book?
I seem to recall many years ago that 4 UBD used to offer a reverse-lookup phone book that would allow you to find the owner of any given phone number -- but I could see no sign of such an item on the company's website. Perhaps the privacy act has forced its removal?

However, The NZ Herald reports today that a group of determined individuals have managed to harvest a significant amount of data from either the 4 Telecom Whitepages website or perhaps from their phone-book CD and have created an electronic version of the reverse lookup database.

The group claims that they believe the information should be free, Telecom claims they can't offer the information because of the privacy act.

Will these guys put their database online? Would it be legal? Does it really matter -- after all, this is the Internet and even if it were to be a breach of the privacy act, the data could be hosted on an off-shore server.

What do you think? Would you use a reverse phone-number lookup database? Would you be upset if your number was included?

As always, your feedback is welcomed.