E-mail Marketers Face Prospect Of Tough New Laws
- by Erik Sass @eriksass1, December 6, 2006
Conway said that bills are percolating at the state level that would make e-mail an "opt-in" rather than "opt-out" medium. In New Jersey, for instance, the legislature is considering a bill that would prevent marketers from sending credit card offers to people over the age of 60 via e-mail, unless they opt to receive such messages.
If bills such as this are successful, they could easily become a model for new laws by other states--and eventually Congress, Conway said.
Alan Chapell, president of Chapell Associates, added that laws affecting marketers already are spreading from state to state. For example, he said, three years ago California was the only state in the country with data breach laws that require companies to notify consumers if their privacy has been compromised. Now, dozens of states have passed similar laws.
In addition, the FTC now is turning its attention to privacy policies. At the Tech-Ade conference last month in Washington, D.C., commissioners indicated that they were concerned by a lack of transparency in privacy policies, Chapell said. He added that marketers might have to come up with new, more stringent policies, to avoid government regulation. "Now the commissioners are saying the traditional privacy policies are insufficient. Again, we're risking government regulation. So maybe we need to go above and beyond the traditional privacy policies."
Chapell also warned that marketers that use behavioral targeting techniques in e-mail campaigns risk running afoul of FTC privacy directives issued in 2000 after DoubleClick began combining data collected from various online sources to build consumer profiles. Many e-mail marketers using behavioral targeting "have no idea about these rules," Chapell said. "You're inviting the FTC to step in."
