Yesterday, he sent a second email apologising and promising to delete the jewellery customers\u2019 records.<\/p>\n
A customer who bought Karen Walker earrings from Silvermoon in 2024, but did not wish to be named, said she does much of her shopping online and the recent incident was alarming.<\/p>\n
\u201cShopping for earrings leading to my personal information being used [for] real estate marketing without me knowing is frightening,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
The shopper said most of her purchases are online where data collection is pervasive and often impossible to avoid as emails, phone numbers, credit cards and other information are frequently put into forms.<\/p>\n
She feared it would become more common for details to be passed around between unrelated companies, an issue that privacy laws say should typically not happen.<\/p>\n
A Silvermoon Jewellers store in Auckland’s Newmarket. The brand has gone into liquidation. Photo \/ Google<\/p>\n
According to the Privacy Commissioner, the law treats companies as separate \u201cagencies\u201d even if they share the same owner.<\/p>\n
They \u201cmust not disclose the information to any other agency or to any other person\u201d unless they believed the new use of it was in connection to the purpose it was originally collected or they have the individual\u2019s consent, the commission\u2019s website said.<\/p>\n
The commissioner has been contacted for comment. <\/p>\n
Lee said his use of the Silvermoon database was a mistake.<\/p>\n
He said he initially kept the information for \u201cafter-sales service\u201d to his former customers to help in case of jewellery repairs or replacements.<\/p>\n
He said he mostly had only names and email addresses of customers.<\/p>\n
He had never sold or passed on the information to anyone else or profited from the data outside of the jewellery business, he said.<\/p>\n
How the customer data ended up becoming part of his Ray White marketing campaign was still under investigation by the real estate company, Lee said. <\/p>\n
In his formal apology email, Lee told those on the Silvermoon database that the use of the data was \u201cunauthorised\u201d and the information \u201cshould not have been used for real estate marketing\u201d. <\/p>\n
He had now removed affected jewellery customers from the Ray White marketing systems and had deleted \u201cany Silvermoon-related data previously held by me\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cI apologise for this mistake.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lee earlier said he had been forced to put Silvermoon into voluntary liquidation in March 2024 because of a \u201ctough economic environment\u201d.<\/p>\n
The six-monthly liquidator\u2019s report found more than $6.3m owed to creditors, including $1.1m in unpaid tax and a total deficiency of $5.6m.<\/p>\n
However, the Silvermoon brand itself has rebounded under new management after its founder bought it back in August 2024.<\/p>\n
Simon Thwaites started the business in 2000, growing it into staple of New Zealand malls before selling it to Lee in 2017.<\/p>\n
In buying it back, Thwaites said he wanted to focus on online shopping with a limited number of physical stores.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Yesterday, he sent a second email apologising and promising to delete the jewellery customers\u2019 records. A customer who…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":348339,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[74,6116,75132,51,138,4381,3105,96596,84246,638,12513,2082,2740,293,16285,9933,1031,111,139,69,1118,22393,6115,13743,185115,52330,2735,23849,6306,3608,16550],"class_list":["post-348338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-after","tag-agent","tag-apologising","tag-auckland","tag-business","tag-customers","tag-data","tag-database","tag-emails","tag-estate","tag-failed","tag-for","tag-former","tag-his","tag-jewellery","tag-later","tag-marketing","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-of","tag-ray","tag-real","tag-sent","tag-shopped","tag-sorry","tag-store","tag-unauthorised","tag-use","tag-were","tag-white"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=348338"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348338\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/348339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=348338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=348338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=348338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}