A Marriage Alliance petition urging MPs to take their “hands off our freedoms” shares signatories’ names, emails and addresses with politicians without alerting users it will supply all those details.

The petition generates a form email sent to a person’s local federal MP and all senators in their state and territory, meaning politicians gain access to data that could be used to build their own campaign lists.

The Marriage Alliance website asks users for their first and last name, email, address, town or suburb and postcode. It says it will send a form email to the politicians – but the example given displays only the person’s name and none of the other data.

A copy of the “Protect Our Freedoms” email generated by the form, seen by Guardian Australia, includes not only the sender’s name but also their email address and street address, including suburb and postcode.

Marriage Alliance’s Hands Off Our Freedoms campaign website. Photograph: Marriage Alliance

Marriage Alliance’s privacy policy states it “will not share your personal information with other companies or organisations” but makes an exception for “aligned organisations” which it judges have “similar viewpoints, principles or objectives”.

It also states it will share information “with your consent: if you consent to the use and disclosure of certain information”.

The email says the sender “like millions of other Australians voted no to redefining marriage … because of a variety of deeply held beliefs, including the belief that marriage can only be between a man and a woman”.



It claims the result demonstrates “that millions of Australians are concerned their key freedoms are at stake – freedoms such as freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, and the right of parents to decide what their children are taught about sexuality and gender”.

The form email asks MPs to “support legislation to permanently enshrine these freedoms into law – regardless of any changes to the Marriage Act”, warning that “the way I vote at the next federal election will be heavily influenced by the way you vote on this issue going forward”.

The email is likely to generate data for all federal political parties represented in the Senate including the Coalition, Cory Bernardi’s Australian Conservatives, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, Labor and the Greens.

On Wednesday the Turnbull government launched an inquiry into freedom of religion, in a bid to head off a bruising battle about whether to amend the cross-party same-sex marriage bill, which conservatives believe does not sufficiently protect religious freedoms.

In a speech earlier in November Tony Abbott said the postal survey campaign had “activated” conservative campaigners and the no campaign was the “nucleus of an organisation” that could become a counterweight to the progressive campaign organisation GetUp.

Abbott warned the Australian Conservatives would be the beneficiary of the new conservative campaigners because it was “the only national political party whose leader backed marriage as it’s ­always been”.

During the campaign Bernardi launched a robopoll campaign targeting 1m homes for “market research” about voters’ views on marriage.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority investigated Marriage Alliance for sending emails seeking donations without the apparent consent of all recipients, but cleared it of breaching the Spam Act due to the way “commercial” communications are defined in the act.