Your Go-To Guide to CAN-SPAM, CASL and GDPR

November 10, 2020 Stan

Everyone knows and loves privacy and compliance law, right? You know, the laws that say you have to provide clear subscription information, make sure you never provide misleading header information (like sender name and email address), requirean unsubscribe link in your messages, and require access to information?

Over the last few years, the privacy landscape has become more and more complicated. Here are a number of commercial communication regulations that may affect the way your organization communicates with your audience.

What are those laws? CASL (Canadian Anti-Spam Law) and GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) are two of the most recent, in addition to CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) if you market to people living in California. CASL has been in full effect since 2016 and covers all messages sent into or out of Canada, but does not include messages simply routed through Canada. GDPR began on May 25, 2018 and covers any messages sent to or received from the European Union. It will also create a uniform regulation on electronic messages across all EU member states.

As far as anti-spam laws go, CAN-SPAM is the most lenient of the three and the only one that is an opt-out law, which doesn’t require prior consent from recipients to be sent commercial messages. But all three do have provisions in common, including guidelines for how you can make it easy for recipients to opt out of further communications (usually by providing the link to a one-click subscription center or a reply-to address you check regularly), a hard rule that opt-out requests must be honored quickly, and instruction that you are responsible for monitoring communications sent from other organizations on the recipient’s behalf.

Now that you know the main similarities of CAN-SPAM, CASL, and GDPR, it’s time to talk about their differences. Take a look at the table below to see how each law handles consent, opt-out duration, penalties, and age restrictions.

There are plenty more resources available to make sure you are complying with all communications laws. To look further into CAN-SPAM and search FAQs, visit the Federal Trade Commission’s website.

To get a complete review of GDPR including FAQs, key changes to previous laws the regulation will supersede, the timeline for enforcement, and a history of how the GDPR came into being, visit The European Commission.

If you’re looking to find additional information on CCPA, visit the State of California Department of Justice.

If you would like additional information on any of these policies, please contact us at Relationship One.

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