As of four days ago, UK com­pa­nies now have to include cer­tain manda­tory busi­ness infor­ma­tion on their web­sites & all emails.

The linked arti­cle explains really well what this change entails (short ver­sion: not much for many web­sites, as nearly every­one will prob­a­bly already have these kinds of details if not in their footer then almost cer­tainly on a con­tact or legal info page), but I’ve still got a few burn­ing ques­tions — mostly to do with fairly inane stuff that only web geeks would think of.

Viral mar­ket­ing, for exam­ple. It’s ille­gal if you don’t say who you are, so no more viral web mar­ket­ing in the UK (and EU gen­er­ally?). Crampin’ style since 2007.

This point from the arti­cle is inter­est­ing, too:

It is not suf­fi­cient to include a ‘con­tact us’ form with­out also pro­vid­ing an email address and geo­graphic address some­where eas­ily acces­si­ble on the site. A PO Box is unlikely to suf­fice as a geo­graphic address; but a reg­is­tered office address would. If the busi­ness is a com­pany, the reg­is­tered office address must be included.

Say hello, email scrap­ing har­vesters. I realise that with fil­ters improv­ing this is the­o­ret­i­cally becom­ing less of a prob­lem, but even so — very few fil­ter­ing providers are up to the stan­dard of Gmail (usu­ally the poster child for “Feel free to post your email address on the web” exper­i­ments), and are unlikely to become such in the near future.

If you’re a sole trader, I imag­ine you don’t have to list your home address, as you’re not con­sid­ered a com­pany. IANAL and IANAL who lives in the UK, but if the ter­mi­nol­ogy is the same as in .au (which, given our com­mon her­itage, I’d imag­ine it wouldn’t be far from), that seems to be the log­i­cal interpretation.

If the busi­ness is a mem­ber of a trade or pro­fes­sional asso­ci­a­tion, mem­ber­ship details, includ­ing any reg­is­tra­tion num­ber, should be provided.

That seems… very hazy. If it means enti­ties such as ICAA, that’s nearly fair enough, but for organ­i­sa­tions like that mem­ber­ship is indi­vid­ual, not cor­po­rate. Same goes for trade unions, etc. The only equiv­a­lent I can think of here might be some­thing like CRICOS provider num­bers for edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tions pro­vid­ing ser­vices to over­seas stu­dents — though there are prob­a­bly other exam­ples one could give.

Per­haps our gov­ern­ment has become more lib­eral than that of the UK, but, even so, it seems a rather odd stip­u­la­tion. For elec­tri­cians you might have green licenses and so forth — but, again, that is admin­is­tered at an indi­vid­ual level, so you’re only really effec­tively get­ting this infor­ma­tion out of sole traders: it seems unre­al­is­tic for larger organ­i­sa­tions to pub­lish this type of information.

Given the sur­prise it seems to have taken peo­ple by (the OUT-LAW pub­li­ca­tion is dated 20th Decem­ber 2006 at the time of access), it seems unlikely that it will ever be very strictly enforced, and appears to be EU-associated pol­i­tick­ing more than any inten­tioned pol­icy. Some of its stip­u­la­tions offer some­thing in the way of con­sumer pro­tec­tion, but, really, if con­sumers aren’t already on the look out for this sort of infor­ma­tion (or lack thereof) when par­tic­i­pat­ing in the web, then edu­ca­tion in this regard should be far higher on the agenda than leg­isla­tive mea­sures. But per­haps that’s just my inner lib­eral get­ting cranky.