One of the behaviours I haven't really understood completely is why agencies and their clients don't seem to grasp the importance of adequate legal frameworks to effectively support their social marketing and collaborative business initiatives? What has been clear is that very few marketers understand just how important it is to have good legal advice and frameworks and they frequently use something that looks right so they can tick the legal compliance box. Unfortunately that isn't a very good solution because even the best intentions won't be much help if they are also woefully uninformed. Most marketers that we have dealt with seem to be aware of the need for some sort of legal structure for their work and yet they just don't take sufficient steps to understand their risks and cater for them. My recent diabetes diagnosis came to mind as an interesting analogy which I explore in this post.
LinkedIn's expanded and more intelligible privacy policy
LinkedIn recently announced an update to its privacy policy and user agreement in a blog post titled Updating LinkedIn’s Privacy Policy. Although LinkedIn updated the user agreement too, the emphasis was more on updates to its privacy policy. The new policy expands on a number of issues and reinforces the extent to which users needs to take responsibility for their actions when using the service.
The Path to the spam Dark Side is paved with lawyers' wishful thinking
Planning for the Protection of Personal Information Act is not a small endeavour and taking shortcuts to preserve current business models may turn out to be disastrously short-sighted in the year or two ahead. My colleagues may be correct in their approach and their clients may be able to adopt a relatively liberal interpretation of the Protection of Personal Information Act and its implementation. I have a different take on how the Act will apply, especially given its broader role as substance for the Constitutional right to privacy. Going beyond the Act's interpretation and application by the proposed Regulator and Courts, the risk of being too careless with consumers' personal information could have even more dire consequences for brands than legal non-compliance.
Practical challenges in copyright disputes
Fake White House bombing tweet craters stock markets
The Associated Press Twitter profile was hacked yesterday and a fake tweet about a bombing at the White House was published. The result was dramatic, the US stock market plummeted and only recovered about 10 minutes later when AP tweeted that it had been hacked and since locked its Twitter profile down.
Introducing POPI's processing conditions
There is a lot more to the anticipated Protection of Personal Information Act and, in this post, I'd like to introduce you to what are known as "Conditions for lawful processing of personal information". These conditions effectively operate as processing parameters and will have a relatively subtle but substantial impact on direct marketing because they limit the scope of what personal information can be processed and for how long.
Join us at the Advertising and Marketing Law conference on 29 May 2013
Paul is speaking at next month’s Advertising and Marketing Law Conference which Marketing Mix is hosting at the Sunnyside Hotel in Johannesburg. His topic is “Social media and the law and impact of POPI” and we would love to see you there.