Telstra is certainly not the only big company in Australia to send call centre jobs overseas. In fact, few big Australian companies that need extensive call centre services have kept all their call centres within Australia. The cost saving, I read, is about 40 per cent. But in dealing with Telstra this week I decided that I will deal only with Telstra's people in Australia. My contract for Telstra phone and broadband services was an agreement made with people and a company in Australia, and the fact is that I would have made no such agreement with people and a company in The Philippines or India. Yet, on Monday while trying to defend myself against Telstra's claims that I owed it hundreds of dollars for broadband services I found myself talking to a woman in The Philippines. It had been a long, hard road to get there, fighting with an excruciating interactive voice-response computer, and by the time I arrived overseas I was in no mood to be gracious. But, if I say so myself, I was. After perhaps 20 minutes of difficulty with accents - hers and mine - and the annoying lag, I told the woman that I was leaving the discussion and that I would not accept a phone call from her supervisor, as she'd suggested, if he or she was calling from any country other than Australia.

She had on her screen, the woman had told me when I questioned her capacity to sort the problem, all the information about me that was available to a Telstra employee in Australia. But that was not so reassuring. I don't want my personal details available so freely to people in a call centre somewhere in the developing world, and especially not when so many of those personal details come together on the one screen. This woman is not even, I gathered, a Telstra employee. In Australia I have a fair recourse against breaches of my privacy by an employee who has access to my personal details, and, despite what Telstra may say, if and when those breaches are in The Philippines or India I would have considerably less recourse.