As is my weekly habit, I browsed the Online section of the Guardian yesterday…
The increasing regularity of spam-related articles suggests that the feature writers, if not the government, are starting to realise what a huuuuuge problem it has become. The latest article tells of the legislation for an “opt in” system for email marketing. So far so good. But get this…
So the EU directive enacted by the new legislation sounds somewhat limp and half-hearted, doesn’t it? If you buy something from a company and give them an email address (for confirmations, delivery reports or whatever) they’ll still be entitled to send you marketing email. Great. And will that be limited to the *actual brand name* (bad enough, if you ask me) or could you conceivably buy something from Woolworths and end up receiving “helpful” product updates from B&Q, Superdrug and whatever else the Kingfisher Group own?