Renegades’ electronic marketing pitch offside, Privacy Commissioner decides

One of Canada’s leading Internet lawyers has sacked the Ottawa Renegades’ marketing department. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner has ruled that the Canadian Football League (CFL) club violated Michael Geist’s privacy when it twice sent him promotional spam. On January 21 of this year, the Renegades sent an email to Geist’s University of Ottawa address. The team was reaching out to the academic community in an attempt to boost season ticket sales. Geist asked how the football club obtained his email address and was told that the school had provided its business directory to the Renegades. He asked to be removed from the mailing list. Despite that request, the law professor received a second bit of spam on February 7. Someone in the marketing section of the Renegades had not entered his "do not spam" status into the computer. Although the mail was sent to his university address, the contact was made through the law firm Geist is associated with. The sales campaign was directed towards attorneys in the Ottawa area. Geist filed a complaint with the Privacy Commissioner, arguing that his office email address was privileged information under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). The act exempts names, job titles, business addresses and phone numbers from protection. Anyone may reasonably expect to be contacted by an outside party who has this information. But assistant Privacy Commissioner Heather Black ruled that the Renegades could not add email to the exempt list. "The University of Ottawa published your name and email with the expectation that businesses, organizations and individuals might contact its faculty members to further the university’s interests," she wrote to Geist on December 1. "The sale of seasons tickets to a football game is not related to the purpose for which the University of Ottawa makes a listing of its faculty publicly available." She told Geist he could file a complaint with the Federal Court of Canada, an action the professor does not plan to take. In a voice mail message, he told Canadian NEW MEDIA he is happy to have the ruling on the books. "What I was really looking for was a finding that showed that PIPEDA could apply to unsolicited email contacts and I think that’s exactly what we got," Geist tells CNM. "The Renegades have, according to the Privacy Commissioner, made changes to their marketing practices, which is a positive thing. I think this will have an impact on many other organizations that use email for marketing because it makes clear that business email is included within the definition of personally identifiable information and that just because something is posted on a directory doesn’t make it fair game." The CFL team has brought in cross-selling reforms that will see the names of people who asked not to be solicited deleted from the list. Geist concedes that the decision will affect mainstream businesses much more than it will firms that rely on spam. No affect on large-scale spammers "This will have no impact at all on large-scale spammers. They wouldn’t respect the finding and you’d have to go to the court to try to do something there," the Internet law specialist states. "But I think where this will have an impact is on legitimate companies or organizations who simply run afoul of the law and push things too far and hopefully people will think twice now in the way they use that information." While Geist has struck a blow for Internet privacy, don’t expect him to become suddenly popular with Ottawa football fans who will want to join him in the south side stands to cheer on the Renegades. "There hasn’t been any damages paid or any free tickets or anything of that nature," he notes.

Renegades’ electronic marketing pitch offside, Privacy Commissioner decides

Broadcast | December 16, 2004

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