Can the POPI Act finally help us get rid of annoying spam calls & SMSes?
Most of us have had to deal with annoying advertising SMSs from companies we often dont even know, let alone ones we have provided our details to. Yet, many consumers do not know that they are protected by the law. If we take into consideration the soon coming deadline for business to abide by the Protection of Personal Information Act (PoPI) and the Consumer Protection Act  that stipulates that any company embarking on a direct marketing campaign has to check its list of numbers against a new national, opt-out register called the Do Not Contact Registry (DNCR), consumers should not have to deal with unsolicited advertising. Nickolaus Bauer, standing in for John Perlman, speaks to Ilonka Badenhorst from the Wireless Application Service Providers Association (WASPA) to talk about whether PoPI will finally get consumers rid of unsolicited communication. When we refer to spam, those are unsolicited messages. This means that a company has approached a consumer with a direct marketing approach and that consumer has not given them explicit consent to receive direct marketing from that company... It's especially relevant now with the PoPI Act that has come into force yesterday, which actually specifically prohibits this type of marketing. Ilonka Badenhorst, Wireless Application Service Providers Association (WASPA)  Listen to the audio below for more...