The European Union’s draft directive on electronic commerce received its latest amendments today, but has been criticized by the industry for containing unworkable regulations for unsolicited commercial email, or spam. Article 7 of the draft directive, has been amended to include a provision that EU member governments must ensure online direct marketers respect so-called ‘opt-out’ lists of consumers unwilling to be spammed.
The wording of the amended article has come under fire from industry figures for being toothless. Joe McNamee from the European Internet Service Providers Association, told ComputerWire that the wording of the amendment is too vague: It would seem to allow many opt-out registers to exist. Every company could have one. In that instance a consumer would have to ‘opt-out’ with every potential spammer.
EuroISPA prefers the idea of a dynamic opt-in system, with users requesting commercial mail as and when they become interested in a product. Any centralized opt-out list, says McNamee, would have to be globally administered to be effective.
The real problem, the organization holds, is ’email harvesting’, a process that spammers use to collect their vast quantities of addresses. A spammer can gather hundreds of thousands of email addresses to spam by automatically browsing newsgroups and web sites. Email servers that handle such vast spams can crash, something ISPs don’t relish. Legitimate commercial interests would usually not gather as many addresses as their own customers may not tick the opt-out box on order forms.
But the e-commerce draft directive does not cover the issue of harvesting. The Data Protection Directive, brought into being in last October, is the legislation closest to tackling harvesting. As yet only four EU countries have implemented the directive. This directive states that consumers must give their unambiguous permission for companies to use their personal information, although it is still a somewhat controversial issue as to whether email addresses constitute personal information.
The European Commission is the latest EU body to revise the e-commerce directive, after the Parliament said in May that spamming should not be banned, as has occurred in some US states. The directive, On Certain Legal Aspects of Electronic Commerce in the Internal Market will now go back to Parliament for a second reading before becoming law, probably later this year.
