The Government last month approved Regulations to implement the European Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications – which will come into force on 11th December. The new Regulations require businesses to gain prior consent before sending spam to individuals. This consent must be explicitly given on an 'opt-in' basis, except where there is an existing customer relationship.
But critics say the new rules are toothless because they do not tackle the huge volume of unsolicited commercial e-mail sent to business addresses, nor can they deal with spam coming from overseas, as most of it does. They also point out that the Information Commissioner, who has now been given the task of enforcing these rules, has insufficient powers and funding to deal effectively with spammers.
The APIG report has considers these comments and makes recommendations aimed at national and international organisations and governments. These are, in summary:
The DTI should change the rules on business-to-business 'cold calling' and take the opportunity to explicitly ban the sending of spam to business addresses, which has been omitted from the new Regulations.
The DTI should urgently review the ability of the Information Commissioner to police the new Regulations on the sending of spam and provide appropriate powers to deal with what will inevitably be rapidly changing situations.
The DTI should support spam 'blocklists' – databases listing the e-mail addresses of spammers which can then be used to reject any e-mail coming from those addresses.
The DTI should review how it might commit some public funds to support those blocklists that meet the highest standards and hence those that they would wish to see used by the public sector.
The US Congress should adopt an anti-spam law that is modeled as closely as possible along the lines of the European Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications.
The Australian Parliament should adopt rules that run as closely as possible along the lines of the European Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications.
The UK Government should press for further work on spam within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) with the aim of creating consistent anti-spam legislation on a worldwide basis.
According to Derek Wyatt MP, Chairman of APIG:
"It is essential that co-ordinated global action be taken against spam. I hope that this report can help build international support for both legislative and technical measures to deal with spam."
A delegation of APIG officers will be visiting Washington next week to discuss how respective legislation in the EU, UK and US could be more closely aligned to more effectively counter the global nuisance of spam.
Commentators do not expect that the visit will be successful, as US lawmakers have consistently favoured a 'marketer-friendly' approach to spam.
The spam report is available as a 36-page PDF from:
www.apig.org.uk/