Recently, I was enjoying a rare quiet evening when my phone rang. No caller ID. At 9:30pm, I wasn’t expecting a telemarketeer, so I took the call. It turned out to be a telemarketeer after all, but a peculiar kind: a police officer told me in a stern voice that I had been seen biking at night without my bicycle lights on. That couldn’t be right: if I had been seen, my lights must have been working!

But when I tried to interrupt the officer to tell him that this wasn’t true, I was in for another surprise. This wasn’t a real officer - it was a voice recording!

Was this a joke by one of my friends? Far from it: officer Van Geel was part of an official Dutch campaign to promote bike lighting.

We Dutch like our bikes. We have millions of them, but virtually none of them have a working head- or taillight. This causes over 10,000 accidents, killing 40 and wounding 500 cyclists every year. Although the law has been on the books for decades, the Dutch consider it unfair to suddenly start ticketing people for 20 Euros. This prompted the government campaign “Lights on!” as part of their general “Gets you home” promotions for road safety. That campaign makes sense. But this part of it didn’t.

Telephone spam has been illegal since 1998. Before that, people would get unsolicited telephone calls with prerecorded messages they couldn’t interrupt or turn off. You’re thinking, why not hang up? The computer would just call back a minute later. Most annoying indeed. Thankfully, Directive 97/66/EC and its Dutch implementation outlaw the use of “automated calling systems without human intervention (automatic calling machines) or facsimile machines for the purposes of direct marketing” unless the operator had prior consent. And yes, that includes messages in the public interest.

Still slightly annoyed at being disturbed during the one free evening this month, I blogged about it and returned to my beer. The next morning, my stats had gone through the roof: Dutch shock blog Geenstijl had picked it up! Soon thereafter news site Webwereld opened with a response by the organizers: this was educational so it wasn’t spam. And besides, one of your friends had to have given them the phone number first.

Excuse me?

Yes, that was exactly how this campaign was organized: go to a website, enter your friend’s phone number and they will be called by officer Van Geel. Sure, there was an attempt to get consent by e-mail from the victim first, but that was so easy to fool it wasn’t even funny.

Is this how to teach kids to treat their friends’ personal data? The campaign was aimed at children, after all, including a nice big poster for schools. Kids should be careful whom they give their personal data to, except when someone who looks like a cop asks for it apparently. Right. Not surprisingly, this tattling aspect caused big criticism from the Dutch organisation Parents Online and even from political parties.

It thus shouldn’t come as a surprise that the next Monday, officer Van Geel got an early retirement.

Arnoud Engelfriet is a Dutch IT lawyer and a European patent attorney. He writes about law and technology on his website IusMentis.com. His bicycle lights are in perfect working order.