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.
I disagree. Spammers are soooo much more annoying than phone solicitors.
-Phone solicitors don't immediately engage in sex talk with your 7 year old when he picks up the phone.
-Coming home from a long vacation doesn't usually mean you're going to have to sift through a blizzard of thousands of phone solicitation calls. (Interspersed by warnings from the phone company about how you're getting too many phone calls and would you like to buy more space?)
-When a huge amount of phone solicitations overwhelm the phone company and force them to invest in additional infrastructure, the cost is passed to the phone solicitors, not to you.
-If you have an unlisted number, and a phone solicitor calls, it doesn't automatically mean that the gig is up and the number is no good anymore.
-There actually exist phone solicitors who are not running scams.
-You don't get hundreds of phone solicitations in the space of 24 hours.
-Phone solicitors don't try to fool you by pretending to be people you know.
-Phone solicitors don't call you and offer to sell you a CD of the phone numbers they're calling.
-Phone company operators aren't kept awake at the phone company at 3 AM clearing wayward phone solicitations out of the equipment after a torrent of wrongly dialed phone solicitations.
-You don't get the same phone call from the same solicitor five times in a row in immediate succession, unless he has an organic brain disorder.
-While they can sometimes block the number from appearing at all, phone solicitors don't intentionally send forged numbers to your Caller ID box.
-If you tell a phone solicitor to take your phone number off his list, he doesn't immediately sell your number to all the other phone solicitors in town. ("It works, someone picked up the phone!") This is because we have laws dictating that phone solicitors cannot do this.
-And you can at least be rude to a phone solicitor. In fact, a phone solicitation from the PBA offers the quick-thinking solicitee a rare opportunity to safely tell off a cop. And you can do stuff like this:
ME: Hello?
PHONE SOLICITOR: (bubbly female voice) Hello, do you subscribe to the <name of local newspaper>
ME: Uh, no...
PHONE SOLICITOR: Oh my GOD! How do you get your news?
ME: Well, if you must know, the government implanted a chip in my brain, and now God and aliens just beam all that news right into my head. Why, isn't the chip in your brain working?
PHONE SOLICITOR: Uhh, OK, ummm... goodbye!