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Canada: Third Party Do Not Call Exemption Collection OK

August 11, 2008

Third parties are allowed to collect and to forward individual do not call (DNC) requests to Canadian telemarketers, including to most of those who will be exempt from using Canada’s new DNC list (DNCL), which will go into effect Sept.30, 2008.

 
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), Canada’s communications regulatory agency, gave its blessing to the practice in letters to the Canadian Bankers Association (CBA) and to the Canadian Marketing Association (CMA), Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported Aug. 5.
 
The CBA and the CMA had complained about third party collection, in particular iOptOut.ca, a free service and website put up by Michael Geist, a University of Ottawa law professor and well-known and widely media-cited privacy expert who has criticized the DNCL exemptions.
 
iOptOut.ca works like this: consumers enter their contact information, they then select the organizations that they do not want to hear from, and iOptOut generates an opt-out request to all those that they choose.
 
Canada’s new DNC law, which is modeled on US regulations, offer number scrubbing exemptions for firms that have existing business relationships with consumers, defined as 18 months from the last transactions and six months from the last interactions. Registered charities, political parties (including candidates, nomination, and leadership contestants), polling, and newspapers are also exempt.
 
The individual DNC requirements, and by extension services like iOptOut, do not apply to those collecting information for surveys.
 
"To the extent that these requests are sent to organizations that engage in telemarketing, and that are therefore subject to the rules regarding do not call lists, these requests would be in compliance with the [Telecommunications] Act and the current Unsolicited Telecommunications Rules," wrote CRTC chair Konrad von Finckenstein. "I consider that do not call requests made through iOptOut are valid and should be honoured."
 
The issue does not appear to be with the new DNCL. CBA, according to the CBC, and the CMA have long supported the registry. CMA spokesperson Ed Cartwright told Customer Interaction Solutions that the organization had called on the Canadian government to create it back in 2001 and has had operated its own Do Not Contact service since 1989, which is compulsory for its members. The CMA will disconnect the call portion of its datafile when the DNCL goes live.
 
Instead the CBC reported that the organizations are concerned about privacy and security issues with third party sites. The CBA said criminals and competitors could abuse the process by setting up their own websites to either eliminate customers’ details from rivals, or acquire their personal information. That would cripple the ability of banks to maintain accurate customer files because they would be prevented from contacting them if their names were on such lists.
 
The CMA has published a statement on its website that says: “The CMA remains concerned that third-party DNC registrations may violate federal privacy law. To that end, we are continuing discussions with the Federal Privacy Commissioner to ascertain her views on whether this practice infringes on the proper use and transfer of personal information, and whether she will be taking a position on how organizations should respond.”
 
The CBC reported that the letter from the CRTC chair said that when such issues that do arise they could be dealt with by The Privacy Commission, the Canadian Criminal Code, and by Canada's competition laws.
 
The CMA had been successful in having businesses prohibited from putting their numbers on the DNCL, which an earlier version of the rules would have allowed.
 
If businesses had been allowed to register it would have made Canada’s rules similar to UK regulations but unlike those in the US, which could have created a powerful precedent as individual states have been looking at expanding DNC lists to include firms. Canada’s telemarketing industry would have also been negatively affected as 60 percent of all calls are B2B reports the CMA.

“We argued that DNCL was primarily consumer issue and that in contrast the demand did not warrant it for businesses,” explains Wally Hill, CMA Vice-President Communications & Public Affairs. “Polls such as a 2003/2004 Environics survey showed that 80 percent of consumers would support a national DNCL. While there may be some businesses that express annoyance with telemarketers the studies we’ve seen show that only about 35 percent support a B2B DNCL.

“And besides, in business-to-business, telemarketing is an integral part of interactions. At what point would people have to stop and ‘why am I calling this person, am I telemarketing?”


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Brendan B. Read is ContactCenterSolutions’s Senior Contributing Editor. To read more of Brendan’s articles, please visit his columnist page.



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