The long process of approval of the new regulation on the establishment and operation of the register of opposition, in implementation of Article 1, paragraph 15, of Law 5/2018 came to an end on January 21, 2022 with the approval by the Council of Ministers. The adoption of the regulation by decree of the President of the Republic and the activation of the new register is expected within 120 days from publication in the Official Gazette.
Set up by Presidential Decree no. 178 of September 7, 2010, the register of oppositions is a free service that allows contracting parties to oppose the use of their personal data (telephone number and postal address) for advertising purposes by operators carrying out telemarketing activities. In other words, through registration in the register (which can be done online or by phone, email or registered mail), the consumers can block the processing of their phone number and address by telemarketing operators and thus prevent the sending of advertising communications.
The establishment of the register was the result of the infringement proceedings initiated in 2010 against Italy by the European Commission, due to the accessibility of databases set up to create public telephone directories to external parties who processed data for telemarketing purposes without the data subjects having received information on the processing of personal data and without their express consent, in breach of European law.
With Presidential Decree no. 178 of September 7, 2010, the register of oppositions was therefore introduced; the implementation and management of the same was entrusted by the Ministry of Economic Development to the Ugo Bordoni Foundation.
The shortcomings of this regulation and the need to introduce corrective measures able to provide users with an effective instrument of protection against the phenomenon of telemarketing, which over the years has taken on increasingly intrusive forms, soon became clear. The main limitation was that the scope of the register was limited only to fixed telephone lines in public directories, i.e. to an area, that of fixed telephony, which in recent years has essentially died out in favor of mobile telephony. Alongside this, the opposition exercised by the user through registration did not annul the validity of the consents given directly by users to individual operators, and therefore it was still necessary for the contracting party to revoke the specific consents given by applying directly to the individual operator.
Law no. 5 of January 11, 2018, amended in a rush by Law Decree no. 139 of October 8, 2021, which provided for the updating of the regulatory provisions in force on the operation of the oppositions register, amended these and other aspects and led on January 21 to the approval by the Council of Ministers of the new regulation on "Provisions on the establishment and operation of the public register of contractors who oppose the use of their personal data and telephone number for sales or commercial promotions".
The new regulation finally extends the scope of the register to mobile users and fixed users not included in public telephone directories, thereby guaranteeing all telephone users the possibility of blocking telemarketing communications. Thanks to the changes introduced by the recent legislation, the opposition to processing concerns not only operator calls but also automatic dialing.
The approach also changes with reference to the consents given by contracting parties prior to registration: by registering with the register, the party concerned automatically revokes all consents previously given that authorize the processing of their fixed or mobile telephone number for advertising purposes (without prejudice to consents given as part of specific existing contractual relations, or those that ceased no more than 30 days before with the aim of supplying goods or services), whilst consent given after registration remains valid.
These are accompanied by other innovations, such as the obligation for telemarketing operators to consult the new register on a monthly basis and, in any event, before the start of each advertising campaign, in order to check the numbers they intend to use and to make calls using a specific code identified by the authority for the guarantees in the communications (AGCOM) or, alternatively, using an identifiable and callable number.
The regulatory framework now seems to be suitable for guaranteeing the protection of users from aggressive telemarketing practices. The hope is that the register of oppositions will not remain an tool unknown to most people, but that the planned information campaign will be adequate to make it a real service.