European Parliament proposes tough behavioural ad rules

[Ian Mason]

On 13 Nov 2010, at 11:25, Nicholas Bohm wrote:

> On 12/11/2010 14:28, Roland Perry wrote:
>
[snip]
>>         require advertisements sent by e-mail to contain an automatic
>>         link enabling the recipient to refuse all further advertising
>>
>> Again, isn't this already the law (if the sending of the email was  
>> legal
>> in the first place)?
>
> I didn't know it was the law (is it?), but just as one shouldn't reply
> to spam because it encourages the sender, so - a fortiori - one
> shouldn't visit the spammer's webpage, which could do even more harm.
> This therefore seems a clueless suggestion.
>

Indeed, that was my immediate thought too.

What is needed is a mechanism for unsubscribes that is, from the  
point of view of the recipient, trustworthy. One possibility would be  
to have an "unsubscribe" link that goes to a trusted third party.  
This could either be an appropriate industry body (say the DMA for  
the UK), or a government department, or a specialist service  
provider. Funding for such would have to come respectively from  
either membership fees, a tax/duty or a subscription. There's an  
issue if these trusted third parties (TTP) were to proliferate too  
far - a consumer should be able to immediately recognise the TTP and  
that wouldn't be the case of there were hundreds of them.

Ian