Living in an Opt-in Environment

SURPRISES in legislation are rare. Which makes a recent event in the European Parliament quite unusual. Minutes before a debate on the distance selling of financial services directive, a dramatic amendment was tabled.

The Dutch member of European Parliament, Ria Oomen Ruitjen, changed her mind about the rights of financial companies to use data for marketing purposes. She proposed the use of an opt-in box that would have to be ticked by consumers before companies would be allowed to call or e-mail them.

The proposal may still get taken out as a result of lobbying by national DM associations. But for data owners especially, it appears to be an ominous development. If adopted in all future legislation, it might challenge the existing business model, especially for lifestyle data companies.

Mark Patron, who in September becomes executive vice president of Claritas Europe, says his reaction to the opt-in clause is schizophrenic.

“We don’t feel directly threatened in the short term because our data is covered by opt-out laws. In fact, it will increase our business if anything. But we do feel threatened because it is very disconcerting and a worrying way to go,” he says. Patron describes his company’s marketplace as stretching from “California to Poland”-a scope that covers a very diverse set of laws. “We operate with opt out, opt in, signature, double signature-you name it, we do it in some country in Europe, because it is not a level playing field,” he says.

Although the 15 member countries of the European Union have adopted the same data protection directive, there is still no consistency in how data can be gathered. Spain and Italy have nominally introduced the law, but do not have the formal infrastructure to back it up, for example. That means DMers risk prosecution as a result of the law being interpreted differently in each circumstance.

Not that all the pressure has gone out of markets where there is a stable data protection environment. The U.K. has a Data Protection Agency, but has still not passed the regulations to flesh out the directive. Even worse, its data protection commissioner is pushing to remove the register of voters from the public domain.

Patron estimates Claritas will lose 2 million pounds ($3.24 million) in business if it cannot use the voters’ roll as a source of names. But this will be offset by revenues of 10 million pounds ($16.2 million) from DMers using Claritas data to verify their own customer files.