Estonia wants more spam protection

TALLINN - Estonia'sjustice chancellor maintains that Estonianlaws do not offer people sufficient protection against junk e-mail and herecommended amending the law on information society services. According toChancellor Indrek Teder, Estoniaoverlooked the European directive on the protection of private life whenregulating advertising by e-mail, the daily Postimees says.

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

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

The justice chancellor gave a crushing opinion of such an interpretation. Inhis words, the e-data protection and e-commerce directives allow to sendadvertising e-mail only to customers who have given their consent for this. Alaw on information society services that can be interpreted in different ways doesnot fall in to the sense of the directive.

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

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