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.

Comments

Real problem targeting spam

[GSloop]

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!

Re:I don't get it

[McDutchie]

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.

Yeah, and you can screen your calls using Caller ID. That's hardly an argument, of course. Besides, automatic spamfilters are ineffective; they either let spam through or block legitimate mail. Companies cannot afford any risk of legitimate business mail being inadvertently caught in the filter, and therefore will not filter at all.

Here are some more reasons why people get up in arms:

• You don't pay to receive phone solicitations. You pay (in Europe by the second) to receive spam. On the job, spam costs employee's time = money (lots of it). Spam is theft of service, comparable with unsolicited junk faxes. (Another way spammers commonly steal service is by hijacking open STMP relays.)
  
• Because spam is paid for by the receiver and not the sender, spammers do not bother to target their spam properly. They randomly harvest e-mail addreses off the web and Usenet. They do not honor remove requests (these in fact lead to more spam because your e-mail address is re-sold as confirmed live).
  
• Phone solicitation is easier to regulate. For example, there are no phone solicitors offering you pictures of teens fucking dogs, or the latest illegal pyramid scheme.
  

Re:We hate spam, Saudis hate porn. Too bad.

[ewhac]

In the end isn't stemming the flow of unwanted spam essentially the same thing [as the Great Firewall of China]?

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

Re:Just make a real remove!

[Micah]

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.

Not so somewhat normal

[Drone-X]

Well, I can't speak for all European countries but Belgium here has a very high rate of people using cable or ADSL for internet, meaning no fee per megabyte or minute (cable users have a 10GB cap though). Heck, how long does it take to download your spam on a regular charged-by-the-minute telephone? I really expect this to have been a non-issue.

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?

Re:Not so somewhat normal

[hearingaid]

Heck, how long does it take to download your spam on a regular charged-by-the-minute telephone?

At some points, I have received more than 4 spams - per minute. (My filters are better now.) On a 56K dialup (which normally gets you 33K-40K), that would net you in the region of 80% or more of your bandwidth, assuming you were connected 24/7. (Spams are often quite large, and include JPEGs and HTML.)