There is a quiet irony at the heart of amateur radio. Ours is a hobby built on the principle of communication — of reaching out across continents, of connecting with strangers in the ether, of broadcasting our presence to the world. We accept, willingly and openly, that our callsigns are public. Our names and addresses are registered with national regulators. Anyone with internet access and a passing curiosity can look us up. That is the deal we sign when we get our licence, and most of us are perfectly comfortable with it.

But there is a world of difference between information that is publicly available and information that is actively handed to someone without our consent. And that distinction — painfully obvious in law, in ethics, and in plain common sense — appears to be one that our national organisations are struggling to grasp.