Dealing with spam in Canada
p2pnet.net News:- Canada’s national spam task force today delivered its report to Industry Minister David Emerson.
I was a member of the task force and served as the co-chair of the law and regulatory working group.
I’ll have more to say about the task force report soon, but I do want to provide a comment on the law and enforcement recommendations, which will likely generate the most amount of interest. The task force helped facilitate a series of cases (including my own privacy complaint against the Ottawa Renegades over unsolicited commercial email they sent me) to test the current Canadian legal framework. Quite simply, the task force concluded that the current laws are not good enough. While Canada alone is not able to deal with the spam problem, we must at least deal with the spammers in our own backyard. The current legal framework contains some significant holes and the recommendations call for a spam-specific law accompanied by a new separate body to work on policy and enforcement coordination.
The most important statutory recommendation is a call for a new rule in a spam-specific law that would make it an offence to fail to abide by an opt-in regime for sending unsolicited commercial email. This would set a critical baseline for Canada — opt-in (as compared to the U.S. opt-out approach) with penalties. It also sends a clear message that PIPEDA, the national privacy legislation, is simply ill-equipped to deal with the most serious spam issues.
The task force also concluded that new legal provisions are needed to address issues such as false or misleading headers, dictionary attacks, and the harvesting of email addresses. It also called for the establishment of a private right of action to help facilitate suits against Canadian spammers. Taken together, the spam-specific statute would be far more robust than the current legal framework and would send an important message to law enforcement that this is a serious issue that demands action.
While there are 22 recommendations in the task force report, in my view the success of this initiative will depend upon the government’s ability to act on the eight recommendations focused on a strong new stand alone spam specific law and an effective coordinating mechanism to make the new system work. That won’t be easy given the current governmental uncertainty, but there were encouraging words today from Minister Emerson.
More on the report in the days ahead…
Michael Geist
[Geist is the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa. He can be reached by email at mgeist[at]uottawa.ca and is on-line at www.michaelgeist.ca.]
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May 19th, 2005 at 6:15 am
While I agree that PIPEDA is woefully inadequate to deal with those unwilling to, or unable to participate in, the ombudsman process of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, I’m not sure that a more draconian regulatory environment is the answer either. I do like the idea of companies being held to an opt-in standard, and giving people the ability to sue more easily. Unfortunately I don’t think ultimately this would be affective.
Conceptually at least I should think that requiring ISP’s to charge a nominal amount (1/100 of a penny for example) per email would do more to structurally inhibit spammers in Canada than anything else. Spamming is a commercial activity that depends on low cost to free email. This amount would be nominal even to a normal commercial enterprise, especially if it reduced inbound spam by any amount.
This also enables civil action for fraud should someone hijack my computer and use it to spam others.
Just a thought.