The landscape for fair information use is far from hammered out. A host of new government regulations are in the pipeline, augmenting those already in effect, according to Patricia Faley Kachura, the Direct Marketing Association’s vice president of ethics and consumer affairs.
Current federal-level debate centers around whether to raise the minimum age children can be targeted by marketers from 13 to 16; the viability of a do-not-email list (which the Federal Trade Commission is studying, despite chairman Timothy Muris’s contention that it would be impossible to enforce); shortening and clarifying the annual opt-out notices currently required by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act; and a new bill introduced by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) regarding security of data sent to overseas outsourcers.
The latter bill came about after a Pakistani woman threatened to disclose consumer information if her pay was not increased, Faley Kachura said.
Faley Kachura also mentioned an April 19 workshop the Federal Trade Commission will hold on spyware — software loaded onto computers without the user’s or owner’s consent that gathers and sends information to an unauthorized party.
These future concerns are echoed by a variety of state legislation. Roughly 500 privacy-related bills are entertained every year, with provisions that can go beyond federal mandates. And as new technologies — radio frequency identification chips, which can pinpoint both consumers’ whereabouts and the location of their high-value goods; pop-up screens and other instant message-based advertising — arise, so do the calls for legislative restrictions.
If that weren’t enough, environmental advocates are lobbying for do-not-mail lists as part of a paper and pulp conservation effort.
Faley Kachura advocated the DMA’s privacy policies, which contain provisions for consumer notice, choice and redress regarding data use. But she also advocates that marketers go beyond legislated requirements.
For example, she said, individuals are not interested in the 31-day window marketers have for entering them on internal suppress lists: For a consumer, that’s 30 days too long. In some cases, consumers who have chosen to receive marketing messages need the ability to retroactively opt out.
When their information is vended through lists that offer a one-time payment for a year’s use, or through CD-ROMs or other media that d not allow messages to be controlled, the result is anger, frustration — and calls for ever-restrictive legal remedies.
Faley Kachura offered her state-of-the-privacy-landscape observations during a session at Direct Media Inc.’s Mailer Conference and Co-op. The conference ended yesterday.
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