Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation or CASL (formerly known as the Electronic Commerce Protection Act and the Fighting Internet and Wireless Spam Act) was passed in December 2010. It is is awaiting proclamation and should come into force shortly. CASL was supposed to promote the efficiency and adaptability of the Canadian economy by ensuring that nobody will be able to send you marketing/promotions emails, unless you clearly agreed to receive them. The subject cannot be misleading and email marketers must identify themselves etc.
Really?? Is the new law about phone telemarketers (the DO NOT CALL list) providing tangible results? According to my phone log, that law is a serious FAIL.
The new Anti-Spam law is aggressive, which is good since most of the time there are tricks to get around such laws and offenders walk away without any repercussions. The thing that makes me laugh is HOW they will proceed to catch the offenders. Will there be a team of experts for that? (A team means more than 4 people.)
What about the usual answers: ‘It’s not us, it’s our marketing firm that sends email for us!’ I even heard once ‘I don’t know these guys, but they’re promoting our website, how nice!’? Are these answers going to let companies get away with this?
My feeds capture millions of emails daily. There is spam on every level both international and local. One local guy could be proclaimed ‘Spammer of the Year’ for his disrespect of almost everything! He has a misleading ‘From’ section, missing or wrong company information, non-working unsubscribe link etc.
Eloise Gratton, a lawyer specialized in new media and privacy issues who is a technology counsel at McMillan LLP in Montreal wrote this very nice paper on CASL and an existing law since 1993 called ‘Act respecting the protection of personal information in the private sector’, a law that is barely respected.
I think CASL is very good, but I have serious doubts about the enforcement.
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