Privacy Awareness Week; getting to the heart of trust

Trust is built here: in the everyday choices, not just the resolutions

This Privacy Awareness Week, the Office of Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) has chosen a theme that gets to the heart of what trust really means: “Trust is built here. In every privacy complaint, in every resolution.” It’s a powerful reminder that how an organisation responds when something goes wrong matters greatly…

Here at Fastmail, this means more than this statement to us, so we’d like to expand on it. We believe trust isn’t only built in the moment a complaint is resolved. It’s built much earlier than that, specifically in the choices we make as a company in the way we work, and how we design our features and product.

That’s the kind of trust we’ve spent more than 25 years trying to earn.

Your data belongs to you!

Two of our long-standing company values are “Your data belongs to you” and “We are good stewards of your data.” They’re not marketing lines we landed on recently. They’re principles that shape how we build, who we hire, and what we say yes to.

In practice, that means we don’t scan your email to serve you ads, we don’t profile you to sell to advertisers and we don’t treat your inbox as material for someone else’s business model. You pay us a fair price for a great email service, and in return, your data stays yours.

It sounds simple when you say it out loud. But in an industry where “free” usually means “you are the product,” choosing to do things differently is a design decision in itself.

Aliases, Masked Email, and the freedom to stay reachable

Two of the features we have developed to help manage your online privacy is aliases and Masked Email. Instead of handing the same email address to every website, app, and newsletter you sign up to, you can generate a unique address for each one. If a service gets breached or starts sending spam, you can shut that address down without affecting anything else.

The core purpose of this feature: you shouldn’t have to repeatedly expose your whole digital identity.

One of our team members, Vysakh, a Tier 2 support agent at Fastmail shares why this matters: put it better than we could:

“E-privacy matters because the data we share shouldn’t be something others can use to track, profile, or personally attack us. That’s why I use aliases in Fastmail. They let me stay reachable without exposing a single identity everywhere.”

Privacy by design, not privacy by accident

Last month, we launched an MCP server for Fastmail, an open standard that lets AI clients, like Claude, connect to your mail, calendar, and contacts when you ask them to. It’s the kind of feature where it would have been very easy to make the wrong call for our customers.

Instead, we built it the way we build everything: with the user in charge.

We didn’t just bolt AI into Fastmail. The MCP server is simply another endpoint you can choose to use, with the AI client of your choice, with granular permission levels (read-only, write, or send) that you control through an OAuth consent screen. If you want it, it’s there. If you don’t, nothing changes.

When complaints do happen

Of course, no organisation can expect never to receive a question or complaint about privacy, and the OAIC’s theme is right to centre how we respond when something does go wrong. Our privacy policy sets out clearly how we handle privacy complaints, and we always follow the correct legal process when we receive requests for data. Transparency about that process is part of being a good steward. Annually, we publish our Data Transparency Report. This report is to provide all of our current and future customers with information on how we manage data access requests, how many we received annually, and how many are legitimiately actioned under the law.

Why it matters, beyond ourselves

Privacy can sometimes feel abstract until you think about who it actually protects. Another of our support agents, Jess, captured this well:

“At the end of the day, e-privacy helps protect those dear to me. For the unaware, data collection can seemingly be innocuous. Many family and friends have thought ‘What is it to just give away my email and name so I can get this free app?’ However, digital privacy protects financial assets, and identity, and provides freedom from surveillance. Safeguards on the digital frontier ultimately bolster protections in a rapidly digitalised everyday world.”

That’s the heart of it. Privacy isn’t just a personal preference. It’s the unspoken act many people do to help protect the people in their lives.

Why do we make these choices?

Fastmail is a paid email service. We don’t have split loyalties, our structure means we will not make money by eroding privacy. Incentives such as this drives the outcomes; meaning our incentives will always favour privacy.

We say this a lot, because we mean it. You are the customer, not the product.

This Privacy Awareness Week, we’re proud to stand alongside the OAIC in building trust. Not just through resolution, but through every choice we make along the way.