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German Court: "Sharing" Your Amazon Purchases Is Spamming (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A court in Germany has ruled that the 'Share' links which Amazon provides to customers directly after making a purchase at the site are unlawful. The "Share" functionality provides buttons which allow the consumer to signal a new purchase via Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or email. The court, ratifying an earlier decision made at a lower court, declared that emails initiated via the Share function constitute "unsolicited advertising and unreasonable harassment."
Thanks for the post, I'll have to check it out.
Seems like freedom of speech to me
Jawohl, mein herr!
Fun fact: Amazon doesn't pay any taxes in Germany, they're all "profits" "realized" in Ireland.
Where it pays no taxes too.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
All spammers could claim the same "freedom of speech" defence.
Fortunately the world is not quite stupid enough to accept that as a valid excuse for what is very clearly unsolicited advertising.
Court verdicts are not easy to read, but they managed to garble it further.
The verdict is not about sharing your purchases but the unsolicited sharing of offers from marketplace vendors.
Because it's not email?
The only mention of Facebook, Twitter, et al above is in the description of the service Amazon provides. The court has only ruled ONE function of that service to be spam - the sending of that message via email.
email is subject to a lot of anti-spam regulations in most of Western Europe and North America right now. This ruling shouldn't really surprise anyone. It'd be interesting to see whether Amazon's current emails actually comply with CAN SPAM (they probably do, it's a weak act, and largely based upon an opt-out view of the world, but that said, Amazon does have to provide an opt-out mechanism and honor it, without checking emails I've had from the service I can't say.)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
That makes no sense. If I opted in to see ads, I opted in. Whether they come direct from Amazon or via Google is immaterial.
No, the question is if there's a valid chain of agreements between the advertiser and the recipient. If Amazon buys ad space on Facebook and I have agreed through their terms of service to receive ads, the chain is valid. Obviously that right doesn't extend to Facebook users in general, if you sign up a spambot of course it's unsolicited because I agreed to receive ads but not from you. So did you in the friend request get explicit permission to send/forward commercial email to me? If not, then you don't have it at least in Germany. And that means Amazon doesn't have it either, you can't get my permission from my friend.
Or the TL;DR version:
Amazon <--- permission ---> Facebook <--- permission ---> you = OK
Amazon <--- permission ---> Facebook "friend" <--- no permission ---> you = NOT OK
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
That still doesn't make sense, unless you mean to say that my friends don't have permission to send me emails, which is clearly an untenable proposition. In this situation, Amazon is suggesting and facilitating the sending of an email by my friend, which is almost exactly the same as something showing up on my social event stream -- Facebook suggests and facilitates the "like" being sent, Amazon suggests and facilitates the "email" being sent.
EU data protection law simply doesn't allow that.
They do not have permission to email that address from the OWNER of that address. This is already well-established.
But that doesn't affect anything like someone sharing on their own Facebook, via their own Facebook account. It's an entirely different process.
You can't give someone else permission to email me or see my Facebook. Only I can do that. But that doesn't affect what you spam on your own timeline.