Why a review of the Spam Act 2003 is needed
Here are a few examples of where I believe that the Australian Spam Act 2003 fails.
Spam Exemptions
The Spam Act 2003 allows for spam exemptions. What this means is that certain organisations, or communication, may be exempt from certain parts or all of of the Spam Act. Government bodies, registered charities and educational institutions need to adhere to the identification parts of the Act however don’t need to allow for recipients to unsubscribe.
Registered charities, registered political parties and educational institutions are exempt from the Act. ACMA
I’m really not sure why charities and educational institutions are excempt from the Act (never mind political parties and the government). The Act as it stands actively encourages charities and educational institutions to send unsolicited email marketing to people and to make it difficult for those recipients to unsubscribe. Why shouldn’t people have the right to unsubscribe themselves from any marketing emails no matter who the message is from?
Unsubscribing
The Act states that every commercial electronic message must contain a functional and legitimate ‘unsubscribe’ facility (except for certain organisations as noted above) and that unsubscribing must be at low cost, or no cost, to the user. What the Act is therefore implying is that a marketer can charge the recipient of marketing a small fee to unsubscribe; I understand that the thinking behind this may be related to SMS (text messaging) where it will cost the recipient of a marketing SMS a small cost to unsubscribe from future SMS messages. It should surely be made very clear however that the marketer must pay any costs associated with unsubscribing and not the recipient.
Inferred Consent
The Australian Spam Act 2003 includes a provision for inferred consent. The rules regarding inferred consent may be read on the ACMA website. Even if consent is inferred then an unsubscribe link needs to be included in each commercial message however this inferred consent provision is way more harmful than beneficial in my opinion. According to the Act, a persons email address must be available publicly to be able to be able to infer consent (among a few other provisions); in 2003 when the Act was published there were far fewer people using the internet but nowadays it is very simple to find most peoples email addresses online. Inferred consent is way too open to interpretation for 2017 and the coming years.
Where to for the Australian Spam Act 2003
The Spam Act 2003 makes a start in reducing the number of unsolicited email marketing messages that Australians receive. I believe that the Act could be more effective in light of how people use the Internet in 2017. Perhaps in Australia we should look to Canada’s Anti Spam Law when considering changes needed to our Spam Act.
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