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Anti-Spam
Avoiding Spam
Reported Scams
Spam Complaints
Results and Statistics
Business Info
Questions and Answers
Press Releases
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Anti-Spam Video Transcript
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Voiceover: It’s mountains of unwanted emails like these that spurred government to introduce the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act. The Act covers any correspondence that unsolicited, electronic and commercial – effectively spam. From September 2007 it has been against the law to send spam either by the internet or text. The Department of Internal Affairs has set up an Anti-Spam Unit to implement and enforce the Act.
Phone rings
Toni Demetriou (Anti-Spam Investigator, Department of Internal Affairs): “Toni Demetriou speaking”.
Voiceover: The Department’s initial focus is on educating rather than prosecuting for unintentional breaches.
Toni Demetriou: “The most important things to remember is that the message must include a functional unsubscribe facility so…” [speaking fades out].
Joe Stewart (Anti-Spam Manager, Department of Internal Affairs): What we’ve found so far is that the large corporates are embarrassed if they’re inadvertently in breach. They just execute a plan and they fix it immediately.
David Farrar (Public Policy Committee Chair, Internet New Zealand): The Act hasn’t stopped most spam because most of it does come from overseas but it does allow them to know that there is now an agency that they can also work with if there is an unrepentant spammer that needs to be dealt to.
Voiceover: There are three simple steps to ensure you comply with the Act. 1) Make sure you have consent to send messages.
Laura O’Gorman (Partner, Buddle Findlay): Well the first thing is to make sure that their database for any electronic marketing is clean. And by that you need to have solid evidence of whatever class of consent the company relies on.
Voiceover: 2) Clearly identify who you are when you send messages and how you can be contacted.
Joe Stewart: And if you’re sending it on behalf of someone else you have to identify who you are sending the message on behalf of. So that takes into account all the e-marketing companies.
Voiceover: And include a working unsubscribe facility.
Joe Stewart: It’s good marketing practice. Your customers may not want to hear from you anymore.
Laura O’Gorman: Making sure then that you can action any unsubscribes within the appropriate time-frame, which is pretty short.
Voiceover: Five days infact. If someone asks to be taken off your list you must do it within a working week. There are three types of consent. Express, where you have direct permission. Inferred, where its reasonable to expect messages will be sent. And deemed where someone has conspicuously published their work related electronic address.
Joe Stewart: Express consent is what it sounds like. You’ve given your explicit permission to a company or an organisation or an individual to communicate with you on commercial matters.
Lloyd Bezett (Policy Advisor, Department of Internal Affairs): You might have gone onto their website and ticked a box saying yes I want to hear about product information from you.
Joe Stewart: Inferred consent. That’s where by the nature of your relationship and nature of the transaction that you’re having with the person you can infer consent that they would want to hear from you about this. So, for example, if you’d purchased a fridge then the company that you bought it from can infer that you might want to hear about the warranty.
Lloyd Bezett: If I send a friend of mine an offer I find on a website or something I think they might be interested in, it’s reasonable for me to infer from the nature of the relationship I have with my friend that they would want to hear from me.
Joe Stewart: The deemed consent is where an organisation, or an individual, has prominently published their name, address, their contact details. My favourite example is the chancellor of the university. He’s given deemed consent to anyone to write to him about university matters.
Lloyd Bezett: If you take the example of say a car dealership. They’ve prominently published their commercial electronic address. They could reasonably expect to receive communications from say tyre companies, car grooming companies, car insurance companies about the products they might be able to offer. They couldn’t reasonably expect to receive information about time shares in Hawaii.
Voiceover: While most spam comes from overseas, the volume generated from within New Zealand is a problem.
David Farrar: Around .1 percent of spam comes from New Zealand. And that’s why I think a lot of the focus is on what we can do to co-operate internationally. But what we want is we want to be able to have a clean back yard.
Keith Norris (Chief Executive, NZ Marketing Association): On a normal basis I think that self regulation works first. But we have a global problem and it can’t be solved by local self regulation, so we have to show the rest of the world that we’re serious about eliminating spam.
Voiceover: World wide eight out of every ten electronic messages are spam. The Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act provides for fines of up to $2000 for infringement. Court action can result in $200,000 fines for individuals and half a million for businesses, plus compensation for victims.
Joe Stewart: And the damages can be up to the amount of profit that the spammer has made. So it’s a fairly rigorous enforcement regime.
Voiceover: There are limitations. The Act only applies to text and the internet. Faxes and phone calls are not covered. It has wide industry support.
Keith Norris: The general philosophy was absolutely clear from day one. Our code of practice and the Act itself are identical.
Laura O’Gorman: The importance is really New Zealand taking its appropriate role to try to co-operate with the other countries and combat it on a global basis.
David Farrar: Where we’ve got to now has caught New Zealand up with the rest of the world.
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