Slashdot Mirror
Spam Under Legislative Attack in Europe
Anonymous Coward writes: "CNN has an article in their Science and Technology section detailing how the European telecommunication ministers have agreed that unsolicited e-mail and wireless text messages should be prohibited under a new data protection law. They also are agreeing to allow leeway for law enforcement to access logs of e-mail and telephone traffic.
Sure I hate spam with a passion, but why is everyone so up in arms about it? Phone solicitation is soooo much more annoying. Why don't people enact laws against that. At least I can automatically filter out spam.
Most of the spam I get now, is from companies that are using "contractors" to spam, or spam from offshore (i.e. China) ISP's. The advertised product is from the US often, but the advertisee is not. Therefore, shutting down the "spammer" isn't going to do anything.
Now I don't know how to practically impliment this, as there are some pitfalls, but with some decent legislation, we could make it possible to target the beneficiary of the spam. That makes it possible to attack the real reason for the spam - where we can use our laws etc to attack it.
Sure, there will be spam that also has you send you money to China/Afganistan etc, but that will make the spam much less profitable, as most people won't do so. Lastly, most people will use credit cards, and I assume that most SPAM scams are frauds too, so the chargebacks will be hell for the spam beneficiary.
Anyway, it just seems that we can't just attack the spammer, we really need to attack the beneficiary. Then the spammers will go away, as they can't find anyone to demand their services.
Sure, I'm crazy, but what the heck!
It seems to me that the telecommunications ministers have much larger things to deal with than cookies. Do they really have the power or reason to deal with the Application layer of the system? Now my site needs a policy to tell people that my app server likes to set cookies? Anyone wish for the time when the web was less commercial?
No. In the case of the Great Firewall of China (and Saudi Arabia), a third party is attempting to block information people want. As such, the sheer number of minds applied to circumventing those artificial barriers all but assures they will be overcome.
Contrast with spam filtering, where a third party is attempting to block information people don't want, with the full support and agreement from said people. This makes the number of sociopaths trying to circumvent the barriers vanishingly small. Moreover, because people support the blocks, the number of people willing to report spammers who penetrate security is considerably higher (as opposed to the China/Saudi situation, where there's likely a silent agreement that the authorities are not informed when the barriers are breached).
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
If you want freedom, you have to support everyone's freedom... -- dawgfacedboy
Your right to free speech doesn't extend to my living room. I assert that it shouldn't extend to my inbox or my telephone either, unless I've explicitly published my desire to receive such contact.
A working opt-out would be great, of course, as you say. But such a thing is not possible, or at least there's been no proposal yet that doesn't just make the spam problem worse by disseminating my email address to the very folks I want to shut up.
That's why the only route is draconian: ban ALL UCE entirely, until and unless somebody comes up with a safe, non-spamming mechanism for blocking UCE.
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
The article doesn't have much meat to it. Boiled down, it says "The Council of Ministers think unsolicited email and SMS messages should be legislated against. Two weeks ago, European Parliament voted against a ban on spam".
Or, more briefly:
Council: Spam bad. Anti-spam laws good.
Parliament: We disagree.
I wish something had been said about how the Council plans to enforce anti-spam laws. I live in Washington (US), where the state government passed anti-spam laws several years ago.
I still get spam. Anti-spam legislation is well and good, but it doesn't seem to work.
If you outlaw mass-mailers, only outlaws will mass-mail. Or something like that.
There are how many millions of businesses in this country? And you're saying they should all have the right to send you their sales pitches by e-mail, but as long as you reply with "remove", they have to honor it?
You want to reply to 5 million e-mails with "remove" in the subject?
Sorry, try again.
Right now it's perfectly legal for those millions of businesses to spam you. The vast majority won't because the 10-100 customers they'd get aren't worth the hundreds of current customers they'd lose. The ones that do spam usually have a working "remove" link so you can opt-out of future ads. If there wasn't a remove option they'd annoy and lose customers.
Spammers have no current customers to offend, so they spam people as often as they can. They also have remove links, but instead use them to confirm valid emails. Spammers like to fake IP addresses and use free anonymous email accounts, so even if you could legally opt-out of a particular spammer's spams, he could just spam you with a new pseudonym and you couldn't (without some serious digging) tell the difference.
In short, spam is beneficial for the few that do it, but not for the vast majority of companies. If it was truely beneficial to everyone, then you would be getting 5 million spams a day.
Your comment about paying per SMS message makes no sense to me as it's the spammer that has to pay, not the recipient. Care to elaborate?
Monkey sense