‘Spam, spam, spam, spam … Lovely spam!’ Why is Bluespam different?

Abstract

The sending of unsolicited communications (commonly known as ‘spam’) is considered as a great intrusion into the privacy of the user of electronic communications services, and is therefore regulated in Article 13 of the ePrivacy directive. At the time of the adoption of the directive, the most common ways of spamming were via telephone, fax, electronic mail and SMS. Technological progress, however, has since created more types of spamming, one of which is Bluespam, i.e. the action of sending spam to Bluetooth-enabled devices, such as mobile phones, PDAs or laptop computers. Although, at first sight, it would seem that Bluespam should be considered as any other type of spam, and would therefore fall under the ambit of Article 13 of the ePrivacy directive, a closer look reveals that the answer is in fact not so obvious.

Keywords:

• Bluetooth
• unsolicited communications
• data protection

Notes

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