Slashdot Mirror
UK Spam Controlled by UK's Advertising Standards Agency
Goth Biker Babe writes "The Advertising Standards Agency in the UK has outlined new rules which govern text advertisements including SMS spam, e-mail spam, and web pop-ups according to the BBC.
All unsolicited advertising must now clearly identify itself as advertising. This is as a direct result of the number of complaints about junk texts, e-mail and web pop-ups. All thought the article doesn't mention it a BBC news report this morning stated that unsolicited advertising must now be opt-in rather than opt-out."
If only we can get this over here!!
Most of the spam I get (as a UK resident) comes from the US. Get them to clean up their act and spam would be dead.
-Mark
...they're planning to enforce this how? Not that I don't appreciate the sentiment, but I don't think saying "don't spam" is going to mean much to the Nigerians who keep promising me untold riches. Still, I suppose you have to start somewhere.
so now i'll get spam which says that it is spam...will this reduce the amount i get? I guess now I can have better email filters, but I dont think it is a real solution to the problem..
The ASA guidelines are voluntary not statutory, they're an industry body that has no legal power, the most they can do is pass a complaint over to Dept Trade & Industry when serious illegality has occured.
Apparently the ASA had a massive increase in complaints regarding mobile txt messages, they went tenfold... from 6 to 60 complaints in a year! Anyway, by June I suspect not a single spam will enter my inbox... errr, right.
I'd like to think it's a step forward in the fight against spam but I'm not sure quite how ...
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
Less than 1% of the spam that hits hour servers is from a source inside the UK.
It is very hard indeed to imagine how this is going to help stem the flow of spam.
The restrictions on banner addvertising is going to be interesting in practice.
Anyone care to guesse how these regulations are going to be interpreted pragmatically?
How will it affect already shrinking banner advert revenues?
Probally the main reason it doesn't mention that it needs to be Opt-In is because of EU Privacy rules, all unsolicted advertising is supposed to be Opt-In.
All forms have to be written that you proactively allow sharing of your information, if you don't expressily give your consent, your information cannot be shared.
The US could learn a lot from EU Privacy Laws.
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.
Can they sue Nigerian or Korean spammeers??
(Can we say 'offshore advertiser' plague?)
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
The only thing I see from British spammers is pyramid schemes and the guy on Blueyonder who keeps sending out virus mails. Hopefully they'll get whacked a bit harder now, which can only be a good thing :-)
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
...
Wife: I don't want any spam!
Man: Why can't she have egg bacon spam and sausage?
Wife: That's got spam in it!
Man: Hasn't got as much spam in it as spam egg sausage and spam, has it?
Vikings: Spam spam spam spam (crescendo through next few lines)
Wife: Could you do the egg bacon spam and sausage without the spam then?
Waitress: Urgghh!
Wife: What do you mean 'Urgghh'? I don't like spam!
Vikings: Lovely spam! Wonderful spam!
Waitress: Shut up!
Vikings: Lovely spam! Wonderful spam!
Waitress: Shut up! (Vikings stop) Bloody Vikings! You can't have egg bacon spam and sausage without the spam.
Wife: (shrieks) I don't like spam!
etc. etc.
If you have to "opt-in" to your spam, then how is that unsolicited?
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
They're an industry self-regulatory body. This means that respectable advertisers won't spam, but mainsleaze was never the big problem. Pyramid frauds and penis pill salesmen don't care what the ASA says.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Just like that 'opt-out' email spam policy with the mandatory unsubscribe link at the bottom of emails - people will either disregard or ignore it.
Today the UK announced that all spam must identify itself as such.
Internet connectivity providers applauded the move. Said one executive "This will make spam easier to filter, but it will definitely increase the amount it get."
Hillary Rosen, spokesdemon for the RIAA said "This will reduce the available bandwidth for evil copyright pirate terrorists."
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
And the rule which stops car advertisers encouraging anti-social or irresponsible driving has been strengthened - now they must not even condone bad driving.
does it really say that before the Advertising Standards Authority (whoever that is) stepped in, car advertisers in the UK promoted road rage and hoped to sell cars by claiming you could hit children and old ladies without the slightest dent to your cherished chrome bumper?
Unsolicited advertising means advertising you did not ask for.
But to opt in means you have asked for it.
But if you have asked for it, it is not unsolicited.
LOGIC ERROR: Norman, co-ordinate
www.eFax.com are spammers
Why is this marked as Funny? It's an extremely valid point...
R Tape loading error, 0:1
My favorite new type of SPAM (at least to me) is the SPAM that uses the Microsoft messenger service on my W2K machine.
Glad I have the firewall on there now...
"Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely."
Well I thought the article did mention it a BBC news report.
Back to you Chet.
Is it fascism yet?
nothing like government trying to do the work of the people.....Once the government starts making regulations on what you can and can not see on the internet. Next thing you know there will be your own personal government employee typing in urls for you and reading your email BEFORE you to make sure it is not of an unsolicated fashion....
What next popup-ad are going to need to say Unsoliciated popup ad in big bold letters then show the ad?
Nobody ever said Government was perfect (and I defy you to find an institution that is), but dammit, it's the only thing we have to bring order and law to a world of chaos. The anti-government, anti-regulation libertarian rhetoric that has captured the popular mind in the last couple of decades has got to come to an end before the spam problem will be solved in the US. The UK is on the right track.
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
How was the story about two lawyers who spammed for some green card lottery and were later killed by some geek?
If people just used e-mail services such as www.hushmail.com and set their preferences in hushmail to accept encrypted e-mail only, then they wouldn't receive ANY spam whatsoever!
You mean one realized that the article does mention it? No surprise there, no one RTFAs on /.
Wha... that was supposed to have been "although"?
Oh.
Someone else opts you in
The effects are likely to be marginal at best. Most large companies are smart enough not to irritate potential customers this way. The slimebrains that peddle Big Man and Easy Money snake-oil won't take any notice. Maybe it will have some effect on the armies of small companies that are competing to replace your windows with new! improved! double-glazed! fittings! - we can but hope.
I can't help being reminded that it was an early Anglo-saxon ruler, Kanute, who famously ordered the tide not to come in.
If no-one responded to spam, there would be no market for the "service" and the industry would just dry up and blow away, some-one out there is replying to the junk. Where there is a demand, there will be a service. Don't reply to spam..
I don't like green eggs and spam Sam I am..
If it's opt in, it's not un solicited, now then is it? SUPPOSEDLY, Gator/GAIN is optin, but I've never said yes to it...
Besides, spam is already opt-in - the little linky at the bottom aren't optout, they'er opt-in - it means that you're reading the emails so, they send you more....
>>
>>
Sorry, Ralsky & Scelson have already hired a lobbying group - there'll never be anything like this in the US.
If you're interested, I now use a spam filter which works pretty good. It's a peer-to-peer filter, so the definitions you create for spam are shared across all users, and vice versa. Since I started using it, I've seen very little spam in my inbox. Unfortunately, I think it only plugs into outlook, but I'm not sure. Maybe somebody here can reverse engineer this baby and pump a new cross-client/platform net...
Here it is
I just find this ironic
:)
The BBC news article says:
"The new code also covers banner and pop-up advertising on the internet, though not a company's claims on its own website."
What do you get when you goto to ASA website? Why a popup of course
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
How exactly does "unsolicited" work with "opt-in"? I thought unsolicited was "opt-out" by definition?
I am alone, yet I also surf the universal backwash of undifferentiated Being, which is LOVE.
If you have to "opt-in" somewhere, doesn't that make it no longer "unsolicited"? (not that that's a bad thing)
I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest.
Great, so now I can add a procmail filter to remove all mails beginning with [ADV] and voila - Bob's your uncle and I'm free of spam.
/Christian
Oh yeah - I also need to filter (adv)..and [AD]...and [-ad-]... and {A - D - V - E - E - R - T - I - S - M - E - N - T } and... well, you get my drift. The point is this:
Spam that identifies itself as spam is still spam, and I already know it's spam without a prefix. So what good is it?
With a standard prefix, Joe Luser can use his Outlook to filter the spam after it has been downloaded. Now, those who does that, wouldn't buy anything from spammers anyway. So the spammer doesn't care. To accomplish his return rate, he just sends out another million emails.. and another one.
There's only one law that will ever work. Don't send commercial email unless the receiver asked for it. All the other suggestions and implementations are just jumping through hoops.
As far as I'm aware these measures are not government regulations as yet. They're are self regulation measures. Still it's a start. If you are in the UK. and you have a complaint about Unsolicited Advertising then it's up to you to contact the ASA who then passes the info to a body who may or may not be able to do something about it
They should be revered for the incredible volume of information they liberate and release to all of us on a daily basis!
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
This is nothing at all to do with the government, its just another press release.
The new EU anti spam directive still hasn't entered UK law, only at that point will we find out which ***government*** agency will be dealing with it.
Doesn't your spam, like mine, usually claim you signed up to get it? Often with some meta-list like GREATDEALZ that you can't possibly unsubscribe from, and unsubcribing removes you from this vendor's list only, that is, if unsubscribing ever worked because it's either a scam or the account is shut down before you can reach it. Maybe I did consent, by not reading every word of a privacy policy that probably didn't exist anyway.
You can sense my cynicism. I think the rule makes sense, but question how much good it will do. Now, innovative enforcement I would be interested in. How about threatening to punish the originating ISP? Is it too much to require them to examine mass mailers, obtain a bond against abuse, and so on? After all, they provide the tools that make spam possible.
It's not a valid point, though. Opting in for something is not the same as soliciting it. e.g. the War on Iraq is unsolicited but I opted in by voting for Tony Blair.
I think every nation that thinks of itself as a subscriber to common decency should criminalize spam. Today the UK, tomorrow the US, Canada, Oz, France... eventually the evil ones will be forced to set up shop in Bolivia... it may be impossible to eradicate completely, but we should all petition our governments to act now.
Question - how much faster would the net be if there were no unsolicited junk flying back and forth?
Yeah, I know. But it's the popular misconception that gets misremembered and repeated... (Mind you, anyone who provides the excuse for the "Paddle your own Kanute" line in 1066 And All That couldn't have been all bad (or as that book would have it, a Bad Thing)).
That must be the UK's plot to take over the world (again). With a few more laws like that, I think there will be a popular movement here in the former colonies to rejoin the Queen's domain!
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
is that something like a bluish red?
Fleur de Sel
I'm all for this. One thing about the article though:
If an email list is opt-in, then it's hardly unsolicited.
Follow me
Will koreans and russians follow suit?
I must learn to spell "advertisement" in all these languages, so that I can filter them!
It's just a BloJJ
Of course, I'm not sure there is much that can be done to affect mail coming from outside the nation's borders and laws.
I tend to agree that enforcement is generally impractical (and there have been lots of discussions around what may really be needed).
However, new laws can be *quite* helpful, especially if they get a lot of press. After all, spam works because people believe the claims, click the link, and give the spammers money.
The more people understand what "spam" is, and the fly-by-night operations that these really are, the less likely they'll be to cough up the cash, no matter how sadly underdeveloped their genitalia may be, or how willing they are to help a kind Nigerian gentleman.
Recognizing that you have received an *illegal* email makes it a little harder to get sucked into the promises.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
Well it's my own fault for opting in to all of the penile enlargement, spy-cam, and russian mail-order bride companies.
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
They seem to be very context sensitive when it comes to censorship of ads. For example, they allowed this very provocative (and not work safe) ad to go forward, on the basis that it would be used in sophisticated fashion magazines.
If it were to be used on a billboard across the street from a school, the impression their ruling gives is that it would not have been given the go ahead.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
I really dont care if people want to advertise their stuff to me, I just resent the crap that wastes your time >
:P
Hehe..... for a second there, I read "resent" as "re-sent". I was wondering why on God's green-and-blue earth you would want to re-send spam to anyone.
I find it unbelievable that SPAM is still profitable for those sending it. On my last count I receive over 100 SPAM mails a day (I own multiple registered domains). If I did NOT use a filter I would forget email all together. With the shear number of unsolicited mails being sent out it just amazes me that anyone out there looks at them long enough to consider responding making it profitable for the senders.
this is good becuase now i wont get any SMS's from my own provider who i dont care to listen to as i am sure a similar system will be implemented for SMS.
The advertisement companies will listen to this in the UK. on SMS you must give some form of UK contact details for sales (otherwise the text was wasted), and if you are spamming, you WILL be caught.
obviously with the international nature of the internet, this will not effect email spam, but at least you can complain to someone now if its .uk!
Now that you've got your own penis enlarged and received millions of nigerian dollars and a university diploma, you don't want others to take advantage, too. That's why you impersonate as spam hater and outlaw spam. You're so mean! May your online viagra supply cease forever!
If all unsolicited mail must now be Opt-In, then it's not unsolicited. . .
I think you'll find most spam originates from the USA via Korea or Taiwan, I don't think I've ever had a UK-originated spam whilst living in the UK or US.
;o)
I guess we'll just have to Sendmail DENY from com.tw, co.kr and hotmail.com
Does the US use Asian servers just because they are badly setup and are open mail relays, or do they actually pay to colo a box in Korea?
In principle I like your ideas, but I see a very real flaw in the from/to pair whitelist concept. People sometimes want email from people who's from address they do not know. Let's say we meet at a convention, have a discussion about your ideas on spam blocking and I want to hear more. I give you my card which has my email address on it (an address for just that purpose). I write down your email address with the intention of adding it to my whitelist so that you can send to me. Then by the time I get back to the office, I've forgotten about you and fail to add you to my whitelist. Your email is rejected and I fail to get the information that I actually wanted from you! - Now imagine salespeople that hand out cards to potential clients (some international) so the client can at his or her discretion, contact them. The client may not wish to give a from address to the salesperson, but may wish to contact them at some later date. With your process, their email will be blocked and the company could/would loose business. The business community would not hold still for that, for long. Cause a man to loose money and you can be sure he will not be quiet about it. Enough of them yelling and governments notice, next thing you know, no matter how good the technology, how well intentioned the process, it will be forcibly removed.
The problem will be(come) that when you receive a message from a sender from within the UK (or EU for that matter) you *must* have opted-in at one time or another.
:
...] Yes ? Yes, you are talking to spammer "X". You got an advertisement-mail ? That means you *did* opt-in, at one time or another. You don't remember doing it ? Well, that's not our problem, now is it. I would advice to see a doctor about your problem of forgeting things ... Have a nice day now. [Click.]
Mind you, the above will probably not be used as an *exclusion-rule* (you did not sign-in, so you won't receive advertisement-mails), but rather a *line of reasoning*
[phone rings
If it's "unknown" to me how am I supposed to answer the question?
i have worked in the hell that is tele-marketing to earn some cash before studies, and from what i learnt i can confirm that UK advertisement must be opt-in. You clearly miss the point. It means almost the opposite to intuition, granted; everyone begins in a state of "i want spam" until they ask the right authority (TPS on phones, IPS or somehting for snail-mail) and from that moment on, anyone sending you spam through snailmail or phone calls is doign so illegally. and you really can get them in BIG trouble (minimum fines are quite extensive, mostly as a way to make every spammer buy the latest edition of the 'no-spam allowed' address list, which incidentaly, brings them £).
now, this is certainly not the way that email spam works, as it is impossible to track down and prosecute internationally, but for email spam sent from the UK, it allows for local prosecution (if you could be arsed).
besides, i dont think this will affect email spamming at all, i am more interrested in how the SMS policy will work out. it is currently not under the same laws as snailmail and phone sales and is actually getting quite hectic (mostly from our own providers!)
i think door-to-door sales are considered the same as snail mail in this sense.
And that would be: +1 Pron.
Go here to create your own Slashdot dis
The tone of this piece suggests that this is a new law. It isnt. The ASA is merely an industry self regulatory body with no legal power. It can only provide guidance and instructions to advertisers. At best they can use their influence to persuade publishers not to carry advertising from the offendor: great for newspapers adverts but irrelevant for spam.
-he who laughs last, is a bit slow.
journal
I doubt this will have any effect on the amount of spam I delete on an hourly basis.
.net domain.
:).
The majority of it is rubbish from the US because I own a
The sooner my wife stops getting emails about increasing her penis size, the better. I'm quite fond of her without a penis
I don't understand why they don't pass a law that makes any unrequested advertisment illegal, fined with at least 5.000,- per mail/letter, for the spammer and his client. The Spam problem would vanish immediately!
Kosi
There is an European Union directive which comes into effect after the 30th October which gives these 'guidelines' legal backing. A company advertising via email must be able to provide 'documented proof' of the consent of the sender to receive the email (although the acceptable forms of proofhave not yet been decided). While the act of buying a product from a company may be sufficient proof, any subsequent advertising should only be for similar products to the one(s) originally purchased. You can find out more info on this at the DTI web site
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