Two activities that look identical

How we work

Why the boundary is settled before fieldwork

A researcher telephoning a household and a salesperson telephoning the same household are doing visibly similar things and legally different ones. Research consists in collecting information in order to understand a market, an audience or an opinion. Direct marketing consists in approaching a person in order to promote or sell something to them. The distinction is not about tone or politeness, it is about purpose, and purpose is what the rules attach to. It follows that the classification cannot be decided afterwards: if a contact gathered for research is later used to sell to that person, the activity has become direct marketing, and the obligations apply to the whole of it rather than only to the final call.

Where work genuinely is marketing, Belgian and European rules are specific about how it must be done. Lists used to telephone consumers have to be screened against the national opt-out list before any call is made, and not screening is an infringement rather than an administrative lapse. Automated calling systems and fax require prior consent. Electronic mail to individuals requires consent, subject to a narrow exception for existing customers and similar products, and every message must identify the sender and provide a free and effective way to stop receiving them. None of this is onerous once it is built into how a campaign is assembled, and all of it is expensive to retrofit after a complaint.

The strongest right in this area is the simplest. Objection to processing for direct marketing purposes is absolute. It can be exercised at any time, it costs nothing, and unlike most objections under data protection law it is not balanced against the controller's legitimate interests at all: once made, processing for those purposes must stop. An organisation that honours it in one channel while continuing in another has not honoured it. On the research side the equivalent discipline is about trust rather than rights: respondents are told who is behind the work and what happens to their answers, anonymity promised is kept, incentives are disclosed and never conditional on the answer given, and findings are reported as the fieldwork produced them. Research commissioned to confirm a decision already made is simply an expensive form of reassurance.