French law requires written user consent for using communication for ads

This is part of the law for a digital republic from october 2016 and just got its implementation decree published.

Rough translation:

To be able to use people private communications for advertising purpose, it is required to collect written consent of the person and it's valid for no more than one year.

This covers everything: email, instant messaging, PM, facebook messenger, etc. for the purposes of advertising, statistics or improving the service and applies to content, sender and receiver identities, and attached documents. Consent of both sender and receiver is required.

Existing practices have 6 months to comply. Consent is specific to each usage (you can't bundle advertising with improving the service, those have to be distinct and are forbidden from being buried in terms and conditions).

This could be a fatal blow to surveillance capitalism. Let's see how facebook, google and the like react to this and if their usual "national law does not apply to us" stance will help them.