Re: Water tight opt-in (yet another FUSSP)

On 01/13/2014 12:21 AM, John Levine wrote:
>> How likely is it to be prosecuted? ``Ooops, we were sloppy with our
>> database, sorry, we're working on it...''
> 
> In practice, not very.  Lawsuits are expensive, and judges are not
> inclined to levy huge penalties against defendants who were just
> sloppy as opposed to actively crooked.

True, but when you manage to get the monolith moving, things tend to get
crunched.

Ours at least seems to be very lazy most of the time, but when the rules
say that once they hit a certain threshold number of complaints  they
_must_ fully investigate, and they see a pattern of BS...

CRTC has handed down a number of rather stiff fines recently in related
areas for similar things.  Of course this hasn't happened with CASL/spam
per-se, since CASL isn't in force yet.  But everything seems to indicate
that they want to start with a bang.  And it comes with PROA.

There is a "oops, I goofed" clause in CASL.  We grilled them on it, and
they were quite clear that that it couldn't be used forever.

>> I suspect what saves us from total disaster is some mixture of email
>> not actually being very effective for mass marketing (perhaps), and
>> companies not yet exploiting it fully (my worry.)

> Given the amount of money that big companies spend on ESPs, I don't
> think you have to worry that they haven't noticed that email is a
> possible marketing channel.  A lot of email marketing from familiar
> companies is pretty cruddy, but that should come as no surprise, since
> a lot of marketing of any form is pretty cruddy.

I think that most of the more mature marketing communities are also
aware of the pitfalls of doing it wrong, and have a disinclination to
outright spam.  I remember the attitude of our more senior marketers
being horrified by the notion of spamming - "why on earth would we want
to piss off our customers?".  Mind you, that was B2B, and the
sensibilities are be a bit different.

Now of course the problems are far more well known, and the marketers
get spammed too.

In environments such as ours, there was a small amount of outright
spamming, but those were junior marketing wannabes in out of the way
places who weren't being supervised by their elders nor following the rules.

That changed <evil grin>

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