Today I once again got my fill of “According to the Electronic Commerce Act, Art. 6 (1) this commercial message may be unsolicited” followed by 5 pages of barf full of all sorts of nonsense, with no formatting, no clearly separated sections, etc.
Since I got sick of reading this kind of nonsense, I dug into the Electronic Commerce Act to see what this infamous Article 6 actually says, and here is what I read:
Art. 6. (1) A service provider who sends unsolicited commercial messages by email without the recipient’s prior consent is obliged to ensure that the commercial message is clearly and unambiguously recognizable as unsolicited from the moment it arrives at the recipient.
(2) (Amended – SG, No. 105 of 2006, in force from 24.12.2006) The Consumer Protection Commission maintains an electronic register of the email addresses of legal entities that do not wish to receive unsolicited commercial messages, in accordance with a procedure set out by an ordinance of the Council of Ministers.
(3) Sending unsolicited commercial messages to email addresses entered in the register under paragraph 2 is prohibited.
So far so good, everything is clear, I agree. There’s no point in arguing about the legal provisions, I’ll put up with it or just block them, blah blah, and I keep reading on to paragraph 4 and what do I see:
(4) Sending unsolicited commercial messages to consumers without their prior consent is prohibited.
Wait.. What? According to this, they first have to send me a little email asking whether I agree to receive all this barf or not, but they don’t do that. They just declare that according to Art. 6 (1) this commercial message may be unsolicited by me and then pour the whole barf into the same email. Nowhere do they ask whether I agree or not – straight from the door to the feet.
I wonder how legal this practice is – sending spam without my explicit consent?