Finns probe illegal mobile marketing
PrintAdvertising or customer relations?
Posted in Financial News, 19th July 2005 09:34 GMT
Free whitepaper – Thermal design of Dell PowerEdge server
Finnish officials are probing illegal direct marketing via SMS, Finnish broadcaster YLE reports.
The Data Protection Ombudsman, which operates along with the Ministry of Justice, says it is looking into dozens of companies that recently sent out messages to mobile phones. One investigation includes a promotion by Pohjola. The insurance company sent over 300,000 messages to clients' phones informing them of a new service.
Direct electronic advertising without the consent of consumers is illegal in Finland. It is part of the Act on Data Protection in Electronic Communications, which came into force on 1 September 2004.
However, there is a difference of view among experts over what constitutes customer relations information and what is advertising. Service provides are allowed to use existing customer’s contact information for marketing purposes. They must, however, give customers the opportunity to object.
Related stories
TechScape: On marketing and mobile phones
Users choke on mobile spam
London boozers offer beer via SMS
Free whitepaper – Total cost of ownership of Dell, HP and IBM blade solutions
Analyst Keynote: The Register Agile Data Center Summit
What Exchange can't do - and Dell can
Hosted CRM Can Be Your Secret Weapon to Success!
10 Strategies for Choosing a Midmarket ERP Solution
Enabling The Agile Data Center
Google Spanner — instamatic redundancy for 10 million servers?
Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu's Karmic Koala
Fedora 12 polishes Linux for netbooks
Sign up, sign up for The Register IT security newsletter