The UK’s Data Protection and Digital Information Bill continues to work its way through Parliament. The UK government hopes to get it completed in the first half of 2024.
The bill is complex with lots of different parts. When the UK government first started promoting the bill they said that one of the ways it would help the public was by reducing cookie pop-ups, reducing the chance of people being pestered by seemingly unnecessary alerts.
Unfortunately, the bill will do little to cookies – that’s a problem that industry is trying to ‘solve’ – but it looks like it could significantly increase the amount of unwanted spam and letters that people receive. From some figures it looks like there could be a 25% increase. Uh oh.
The bill makes it easier for more organisations to send unwanted mail
Current UK legislation and guidance effectively says that unless organisations have consent then they need to carry out a number of tests to decide whether they have a ‘legitimate interest’ in sending direct marketing to people.
The data protection regulator say that those tests mean organisations need to consider things like the nuisance factor of unwanted adverts and the effect they might have on people in vulnerable situations. Sounds sensible.
If the regulator’s guidance is not followed then organisations can be fined. That also sounds sensible.
But the new bill explicitly says that direct marketing – a category that includes things like posted or emailed adverts – is an example of a legitimate interest.
The bill is long and complex, you’ll find the change in the section on “lawfulness of processing”, but what does it mean for people?
Industry thinks this will mean that a lot more money is spent on adverts
At a conference last year the CEO Direct Marketing Association said that this change is an important clarification and that they expect it to mean that an extra £250m will be spent on printing and posting adverts through people’s letterboxes.
The Advertising Association said that £1.1bn was spent on direct mail in 2021 so an extra £250m means about a 25% increase in the amount of printed adverts that we’ll all get.
If those estimates are correct then it seems reasonable to think that there’ll be a similar 25% increase in the number of emailed adverts.
Obviously some adverts are useful, but people hate spam
Last year I worked on a project with the team at IF that researched how people felt about advertising.
It was pretty clear that most people like some advertising, I mean who wouldn’t want a discount for their favourite food in the middle of a cost of living crisis.
But it was also very clear that people hated unwanted advertising, particularly when it came through their letterboxes and into their emails, and that there was too much of it already.
Unwanted adverts makes life harder for everyone because we need to wade through them to find meaningful things, like the increasing number of notifications that public services send us about our taxes, health, or benefits.
It makes it particularly hard for people in vulnerable situations. Some people find it harder to sift through the volume of letters and emails to find the important things, while more people with specific vulnerabilities might be targeted by bad organisations.
That is why the ICO recommends those tests under the current legislation. It helps reduce the proportion of unwanted, or actively harmful, adverts that people receive.
In IF’s research we also found that people wanted other ways to reduce unwanted adverts, for example by using their legal right to object. Unfortunately that legal right is not being respected.
Instead of fixing these things – and giving people more useful and controllable advertising – the government seems to be changing the legislation so that more adverts can get sent.
Do the industry’s figures on increased spend on advertising feel ‘right’?
It is genuinely hard to tell if the industry’s figures are accurate.
Government has published an impact assessment for the bill. It says that this change will save organisations about £4.5m per year and notes the potential risks to people in vulnerable situations.
The impact assessment does not attempt to quantify those risks whether in monetary terms, in terms of the number of people affected, or the number of extra unwanted adverts that people will receive. It does not bring to life how an increase in marketing will affect people.
But will advertisers really spend even more money on advertising? Or just shift it between different types of advertising like direct mail, email and online adverts? Perhaps they will spend more money but it will simply get swallowed up within the opaque online advertising industry?
Who knows.
But given that the expected benefits are a tiny £4.5m a year in reduced costs, perhaps more people should be asking how much extra spam people will get in return?