Estonia wants more spam protection

TALLINN - Estonia's justice chancellor maintains that Estonian laws do not offer people sufficient protection against junk e-mail and he recommended amending the law on information society services. According to Chancellor Indrek Teder, Estonia overlooked the European directive on the protection of private life when regulating advertising by e-mail, the daily Postimees says.

Currently, sending spam to private individuals is allowed only if the recipient has given his consent or if he has been informed how to decline further advertising in a simple way. However, the law does not make it clear whether one or both conditions have to be met.

In the interpretation of enterprises that clog up their customers' mailboxes with advertising, if there is at the end of an advertising e-mail a link that can be clicked to remove the recipient from the mailing list everything is legal, the paper says.

The justice chancellor gave a crushing opinion of such an interpretation. In his words, the e-data protection and e-commerce directives allow to send advertising e-mail only to customers who have given their consent for this. A law on information society services that can be interpreted in different ways does not fall in to the sense of the directive.

As an exception, the directive allows advertising by e-mail without previous consent only by companies that have obtained the recipient's data upon the signing of a client's agreement. But even then, only advertising products of the same nature are allowed. Furthermore, under the directive legal persons too should be safeguarded against spamming.

The information technology company IT Grupp conducted a study in May which showed that roughly 37.5 million junk e-mails with a combined volume of 187.5 gigabytes move in Estonian Internet networks daily.