If you’ve applied for a rental lately, you know the drill: create an account on an app you didn’t choose, then hand over payslips, ID documents, bank details and answers to a long list of personal questions, or don’t apply at all. A landmark ruling has now put that industry on notice. Here’s what happened and what it means for anyone renting in Australia.
The Ruling
After a year-long investigation, the Privacy Commissioner found that 2Apply, one of Australia’s most-used tenancy application platforms with more than 8.5 million applications processed, breached Australian privacy law by collecting excessive personal information through unfair means over a five-year period.
The platform has been required to stop collecting a range of information, including applicants’ gender, student status, citizenship status and visa expiry, and details of previous living history, and to have its practices reviewed by an independent privacy expert.
“Renters often lack real choice when making rental applications,” Privacy Commissioner Carly Kind said.
That lack of choice was central to the finding. In a tight rental market, the ultimatum is stark: hand over the data or risk missing out on a home.
Why It Matters Beyond One App
2Apply is one of an estimated 57 third-party rental platforms operating in Australia, and consumer surveys have found around 41 per cent of renters felt pressured into using one. The Commissioner has explicitly told the wider industry to take note, and the determination was sent to real estate peak bodies.
The ruling also broke ground on how these platforms are designed. The Commissioner examined the application forms themselves and found manipulative design tactics, including bundled consent, where agreeing to one thing quietly signs you up for several. And she acknowledged something renters have long suspected: over-collection of personal details can increase the risk of discrimination in how applications are assessed.
There’s a security dimension too. Every extra document sitting in a platform’s database is exposure if that platform is ever breached, and rental applications are among the richest identity bundles anyone hands over.
What You Can Do When Applying
You can’t opt out of the rental market, but you can apply smart. Provide what’s reasonably necessary to assess you as a tenant, identity, income, rental history, and treat requests beyond that as optional until told otherwise; the ruling confirms much of it never should have been mandatory. Where a form allows attachments, redact what isn’t needed, such as blacking out account numbers on statements. Decline marketing consents and any bundled extras, and keep copies of what you submitted and where.
Afterwards, you have rights too: you can ask a platform what it holds on you and request deletion of information from unsuccessful applications. If a platform refuses to correct or delete unnecessary data, complaints go to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.
The Bigger Picture
Rent tech isn’t going away, and much of it makes renting genuinely easier. What this ruling establishes is that convenience for agents can’t come at unlimited cost to renters’ privacy, and that the design of a form can itself be unfair. Reform advocates want stronger protections written into law, and more rulings are likely as the regulator watches how the other 56 platforms respond. For now, the practical shift is this: renters are entitled to push back on excessive data demands, and the law has just proven it agrees.
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