Unsolicited Electronic Messages Bill

  1. Hong Kong after months of public consultations is proposing an Unsolicited Electronic Messages Bill. This proposed bill has the following major features:
    1. Enforce Opt-out (One needs to check before sending)
    2. Technology Neutral (cover SMS, FAX and Email)
    3. Prohibit address harvesting

    Generally, HK Government's effort is appreciated and the bill is comprehensive. There is not loophole the drafted bill does not quite get it.
    Under this bill, government propose to empower the Telecommunications Authority (TA) to set up "do-not-call registers", "which would be to facilitate recipients to opt out from receiving further commercial electronic messages from all electronic marketers and for senders of commercial electronic messages to ascertain the electronic addresses to which they should not send further commercial electronic messages unless they have specific consents. "This kind of register is very likely to be abused by malicious person to validate email addresses. To address this potential abuse, "We propose to make it an offence for an electronic marketer using those information from the TA for any purpose other than for ascertaining whether a registered user of an electronic address does not wish to receive unsolicited commercial electronic messages"

Criminalizing this act seems to be effective at first glance. But if you consider 90% of spam are not HK-originated, the new offence is meaningless, at least 90% of the time.

I think the Telecommunications Authority should have strict rules on how the public access "do-not-call registers". At least the person accessing this "do-not-call registers" should have a valid business registration number or ID card number.

More information on how Australia is doing can be found here.

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