This year's first guidelines from the Portuguese Data
Protection Supervisory Authority ("CNPD") are on direct
marketing electronic communications (Guidelines/2022/1).
They address a topic that is still under revision, mainly, in
the framework of the (future) EU ePrivacy Regulation, which since
2017 has been subject to successive delays due to lack of consensus
among Member States within the Council of the European Union.
These Guidelines were essentially motivated by the increasing
number of reports addressed to the Supervisory Authority, regarding
unsolicited electronic communications, having the CNPD registered
more than two thousand reports in 2021.
However, difficulties arise not only for data subjects, but also
for companies who face several challenges when planning their
electronic communications for direct marketing purposes. Within the
questions that arise, the most relevant and frequent are those
related to the possibility of sending electronic
