Songstress Sheryl Crow is uncompromising in her tune A Change Will Do You Good: “If you wanna reach me, leave me alone!”

Take it as a message of self-confidence and assurance: ‘I am smart enough to know what I want, and am capable enough to get it if I want – even without your marketing messages!’

Canadian legislators and telecom regulators may not be quite as tough as Sheryl Crow, but they are putting in place significant rules that are designed to protect consumers from unwanted commercial messages.

Without your explicit permission, commercial electronic messages cannot be sent to you. If you say, ‘Hey, telemarketers, don’t call me’, they should not call you. If you say, ‘I don’t want your e-mails’, they shouldn’t send you any.

Effective July 1^st, new Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) comes into effect, and it’s designed to give Canadians the right and ability to reject or accept marketing messages and similar kinds of e-mails, primarily, those sent by Canadian companies to Canadians.

What’s more, government regulators announced that, effective immediately, for anyone who has registered their phone number on the National Do Not Call List (DNCL), that will now be permanent. (Prior to this change, Canadians had to re-register their numbers based on terms set out in the telemarketing regulation.)

The new anti-spam rules come with a hefty punch: the penalties run up to $10,000,000 per violation for a company, as much as $1 million per violation by an individual. Those who violate the Do Not Call provisions face a much lighter penalty: up to $1,500 per violation for individuals and up to $15,000 per violation for corporations.

CASL (spoken as ‘castle’) includes specific rules that must be followed when sending commercial electronic messages (CEMs), that is, an e-mail that includes an to purchase, sell, barter or lease a product, good or service; or to provide a business or investment opportunity, among other criteria.

CEMs, by the way, can be an e-mail, a text or a cell phone message – all forms of commercial electronic messages are covered the same way.

In fact, sending a message that asks for permission to send a message is considered a CEM.

That’s crucial as the new law requires any sender to gain such consent, and to have a record of the permission that is granted. CASL is known as an ‘opt-in’ law (the consumer must agree or opt in to receiving commercial messages) as opposed to ‘opt-out’ rules found in other legislation.

(If you subscribe to an e-newsletter service, for example, you should have by now received a request to give them permission to continue mailing it to you – all you have to do is click or confirm your willingness to receive the messages, at a certain e-mail address.)

The law defines different kinds of permission, and e-mail senders are expected to know and understand the differences.

Fortunately (hopefully) many Canadian companies already have an message management model in place, based in part on existing legislation affecting e-mails (such as PIPEDA, Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act; or CAN-SPAM, the U.S. anti-spam legislation) usage.

But under PIPEDA and CAN-SPAM, messages could still be sent without consent (unless the recipient requests they stop); this is the opposite of CASL, which says emails can only be sent when the recipient has provided some form of consent.

The burden of proof that such consent exists lies with the company or individual that sent the message. Companies must be able to prove they are not in violation, if called upon by regulators do to so, and so they must carefully track and document a source and origin of permissions, and maintain the data that confirms and documents such permission.

There’s a government website with specific information about the new anti-spam laws, and there is a website for people who have complaints about telecom services in Canada, appropriately enough named the Commission for Complaints for Telecommunications Services .

 

-30-

 submitted by Lee Rickwood