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Canadian Privacy Commissioner Issues Spam Decision
The Canadian Privacy Commissioner recently considered a complaint involving spam.
After receiving an unsolicited commercial email at his work email address, the complainant asked the sender (a football team) not to send him any future emails. However, two weeks later the complainant received another email from the team. Upon further investigation, the complainant learned that the team had obtained his email address from the complainant's website.
The Privacy Commissioner concluded that the complaint was well-founded. She ruled that the complainant had not consented to the use of his email address for marketing purposes and that none of the exceptions to requirement for consent applied.
However, the most controversial aspect of the decision is that the Privacy Commissioner ruled that a business e-mail address is "personal information" under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act. This is surprising given that business phone numbers and addresses are exempted from the definition of "personal information". In any case, the result would have been different in B.C. where the private sector privacy legislation specifically excludes business e-mail addresses from the definition of "personal information".
For a copy of the decision, visit:
http://www.mgblog.com/resc/GeistPCCSpamdecision.pdf