New bidder for national opt-out registry

In terms of the Consumer Protection Act (CPA), it is illegal to contact a person who has added his or her contact details to the national opt-out registry.

"Operating the national opt-out registry is a great responsibility. It should be run by a trusted and independent entity and it should be very user friendly," says Joe Botha, CEO of TrustFabric, a Cape Town start-up. It launched an alternative to the DMA's opt-out service in June.

"It gives users a way to define how businesses are allowed to contact them via email, phone, text message and snail mail. It is an advanced opt-out service, which is aware of business relationships and is designed with the Consumer Protection Act and the Protection of Personal Information Bill in mind," he adds.

"Power in the hands of the customer"

"Our focus has been on making the service convenient and accessible. User numbers have grown rapidly after a TrustFabric user's blog post made it to the top of http://news.ycombinator.com news aggregator last week."

"We already have more than 70 000 customer records loaded and we've had positive feedback from both customers and businesses using our services."

TrustFabric offers vendor relationship management (VRM). "Businesses use CRM to manage relationships with their customers, while VRM in turn provides customers with tools to manage relationships with businesses. The new service is a natural extension of this ethos as it puts power back in the hands of the customer."

For more information, go to www.trustfabric.com.