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Last week, at its second-reading vote on the Data Protection Directive, the European Parliament's Citizens' Rights Committee maintained decisions that deal with data protection in the EU. The committee decided to uphold a series of European Parliament positions on items such as retention of user data for telecommunications services and the use of cookies on the Internet.
Importantly, the committee also affirmed Parliament's position that Member States should have the right to decide whether Net-users should give prior permission before being sent unsolicited commercial e-mail, or spam, through a policy known as the 'opt-in' system. And in the case of commercial messages by fax, SMS or automated calling systems, the committee also said users should only be sent these messages if they have given their prior consent.
The full vote on these issues by the European Parliament is expected to occur next month, and if it passes and is ratified by the member states, it will become law in Europe.
SMS marketing, which will be restricted if the law is passed, has proven to be incredibly effective and inexpensive tool for advertisers. In fact Ovum Research says that response rates for SMS marketing range from four percent to 40 percent and brand recall is between 46 percent and 64 percent. Moreover, Ovum says there is a high immediacy of response, with 30 percent of recipients responding within the hour and 70 percent within 24 hours.
With the effectiveness of SMS as a marketing tool apparent, operators have sometimes been reluctant to curb text-based advertisements that some users might consider obtrusive. This is because the phone companies are able to claim more revenues on the increased traffic such activities can provide. Although operators do not generally vocalise objections to m-spam blocking laws, moves to make SMS marketing an exclusively opt-in system could cut into important revenue sources for the phone companies.
"I can't speak for the operators, but most developers would agree that the opt-in system for SMS marketing is the best way to go," explained Eamon Hession, managing director of Irish mobile marketing and software company Puca.
But Hession said that such moves from the EU may not be effective in stamping out m-spam in Europe. "It's not always clear exactly what opt-in is, and it therefore will be difficult to police," he said. Hession claimed that other measures, such as international SMS termination fees and policing by the operators themselves may be more effective tools to stop mobile spamming.
Hession also points out that SMS spam is often linked to Premium SMS codes which a regulated by RegTel in Ireland. According to Hession, RegTel could prevent a substantial level of SMS spam by cutting off premium SMS services to abusive companies.
The Citizens' Rights Committee's other decision on the use of cookies, paves the way for light restrictions on the use of the technology by Web sites. The decision is also an important one, but it puts the European Parliament at odds with the European Council which wants to give users the choice to block the use of cookies each time a Web site tries to record the data.
A cookie is a kind of footprint that is recorded each time a users visits a Web site. Cookies keep track of people's user names and passwords, language preferences and other pieces of data.
Advocates of cookies say that the technology makes surfing the Web and e-shopping easier and faster but opponents say that data retained through the use of cookies infringes on privacy and could be abused by unscrupulous advertisers or other, possibly malevolent purposes. A vote on this issue by the European Parliament is also expected in May.
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