The National Consumer Commission (NCC) is holding off implementing the much-delayed national do-not-contact registry, until issues with conflicting laws are ironed out.
NCC commissioner Ebrahim Mohamed explains the commission is seeking to have the Department of Justice clarify the conflicting marketing regimes contained in the Consumer Protection Act (CPA) - which governs the NCC - and the Protection of Personal Information Act (PPI), which has yet to come into effect.
Mohamed explains the CPA provides for an opt-out regime, while PPI creates one in which people need to choose to be marketed to - or opt in. He says the database will be held in abeyance until these issues are sorted out, because he does not want to confuse the market.
Elizabeth de Stadler, director at Novation Consulting, says it is very late in the day to be sorting out these conflicting issues. "This should have been discussed and resolved when PPI was being drafted (which took five years, I might add)."
De Stadler says in principle, the laws could co-exist, but the marriage between a national opt-out registry and an opt-in system is not an easy one.
The NCC recently issued a gazette seeking expressions of interest for the development of the national opt-out registry, with the aim of having the system in place by May. Mohamed says no more than three bids arrived from interested parties.
The invitation was the commission's second attempt at setting up a registry, which is likely to be outsourced at no charge to either the NCC or consumers.
Currently, less than 400 000 consumers have signed up on SA's two currently known registries, run by the Direct Marketing Association of SA and TrustFabric - a small figure considering there are almost 14 million economically active citizens out of SA's total population of 51 million.
The database, which has been three years in the making, would allow consumers to pre-emptively block all forms of communication from direct marketers.
TrustFabric says it is estimated that more than 200 million direct marketing calls and messages are generated each month. The Internet Service Providers' Association has estimated the cost of local e-mail-related direct marketing amounts to about R20 million a year in wasted time and traffic.
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