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Inappropriate Spam Reaching Children?
peeweejd writes "Wired has an article stating that four out of five children receive inappropriate spam e-mail touting get-rich-quick schemes, and almost half receive spam linking to pornographic materials. Should spammers be held responsible for the spams they send out? Can someone sue a spammer for offering to sell 'adult only' items/services to children?" There are more details from survey originator Symantec's press release - and yes, Symantec does sell mail filtering software.
From the underlying study:
The survey, conducted online for Symantec by Applied Research, a
full service market research firm, interviewed 1,000 youths
between the ages of seven and 18.
I wish they disclosed the breakdown of ages. There is a vast
difference in seventeen year old reading e-mail without their
parents and seven year olds.
I would like to know how many of the children in this study were
12 or under.
When asked how often they check emails, 72 percent of the
respondents said a few times a week to a few times a day. When
asked how important it is to always have mom or dad check emails
with them, nearly one in three said it is not important, 21
percent said they don't care and 16 percent said they don't want
their parents to check their emails with them. Furthermore, when
asked whether they get parents' permission before giving out
their personal email addresses to friends or even people and Web
sites with which they are not familiar, 46 percent of the youths
responded that they do not..
Again, this is highly dependant on the ages of the children.
Younger children would be more likely to ask their parents to
help them get their e-mail, while teenagers would be far more
likely to want their parents to just leave them alone.
It's difficult to infer anything meaningful from these numbers.
Doug Tolton
"The destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn't." -John Galt
Just imagine if you had started enlarging your penis at age 6.
What's worse is those HTML emails that have porn already in them, with misleading subjects. So the even the kids that know to delete them but use the preview pane in Outlook will see it.
Should be illegal.
I wondered why my 6-year-old was refinancing his mortgage.
Your paranoia is about as subtle as the alien probe in your neck.
"Inappropriate spam"? Ehm... is there any other kind of spam?
Any teenagers in that half were so, so lying.
The coolest voice ever.
I someone was caught trying to sell children a dildo in the street that person would probably serve jail time for that. Cant see how offering dildos to kids through the internet is different.
Sindri Traustason.
I don't think you've seen a lot of the porn out there.
"Mommy, what's that lady doing to that horsie?"
We aren't talking about playboy and cheesecake here. Some of it is wildly inappropriate stuff.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
The problem here is distinction.
The internet is silmutaniously the worlds largest strip club and the worlds largest library/school/university all rolled into one.
Hmm... after typing that, I just realized what educators could do differently to raise my grades...
Anyway... You made the point that parent's shouldn't be dropping their kids off at strip clubs. The problem is, when the strip club is the school, that means you should no longer drop your kids off at school, either... if that makes sense...
that's like saying that Girls Gone Wild is offering anyone watching TV at night, despite age, and should be punished.
A Girls Gone Wild commercial contains no nudity, no graphic descriptions of sex acts. It airs during the late-night hours, when children are likely to be in bed. It does not air on childrens' television stations. There are rules governing content like that, in order to lessen its exposure to minors. In other words, your analogy is crap.
hate spam and wished it would die, but people need to take responsibility for their own actions
And what actions would those be? Receiving unsolicited porn email? Yeah, I say hang 'em! Nice one, champ.
If you fall off a building, go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will be like hey, free dummy
"win a Playstation,"
"meet singles online,"
"lose 15 pounds in two days,"
"buy herbal Viagra online,"
Damn, they're that coherent? Mine don't make nearly make that much sense. Why, here's a sampling of subject lines straight from my Hotmail inbox:
"hard vertilde suvereniteetti"
"Att: a gargantuan thing ffx"
"Ssrt life skillss rrewaarrdded - whhy waiit"
"embrafeable stronlhold"
"Kimberly said you"
"bending moment"
"pebble ruimnaalden orrella nnthayer"
"How is it applied?"
"varnish-treated"
I don't know what an embrafeable stronlhold is, but I know I've always wanted one. Varnish-treated.
The coolest voice ever.
Spam has long been out of control. Where I work currently, spam consists of about 81% of all incoming email. This is at a company receiving over 1 million emails a day.
There are laws existing to protect children from exposure to 'adult' materials. These permit their parents to control, to some extent, the exposure of such material to their children.
Spam is getting away with breaking these laws. I can't see any parent, no matter how open minded, wanting their child to see breast enlargement, penis enlargement and watch this teen fuck barnyard animal emails.
When they see this stuff, they start to form opinions. Without guidance, these opinions can be off base by a large margin. Seeing the enlargement ads, children could well get the idea that they need to have 44DD breasts or 14" penises (penii?) in order to 'fit in.'
Exposing kids to the hard core images in these emails surely must be against some laws and if not, they should be expanded to cover it.
Also, Spam email should be part of the telemarketing crack down. There should be an opt-out email list to keep from getting unsolicited email.
These adjustments to law would go a long way to reducing wasted bandwidth on the net, as well as improving the moral growth of our nation's children. Sheesh, I sound like Jerry Falwell, but I'm far from it.
I agree.
I mean really, if the corner gas station attendent was selling cigarettes, beer, or pornagraphy to underaged children, would he be held responsible? The obvious answer is yes, he would. So, why would we treat spammers any differently?
...interesting if true.
But spambots will just strip off the .inv. Besides, I'm sure me@me.com likes getting all the email I sign him up for.
don't get me wrong, sexual hypocrisy is a problem in the world, especially in the us.
but everyone can support a legal measure that insists on a hands-off attitude towards children and sexual overtures from adults... from sexual conservatives like john ashcroft, who has to cover up naked breasts on statues behind him on stage (snicker), to righteous liberal sex-advice columnists, like dan savage. nobody likes pedophilia, period. no slippery slope here folks.
now, since spammers spew indiscriminantly, they have no way of knowing if the account they are sending to is owned by a child. meanwhile, responsible email mass-mailers have means of knowing who their audience is and can easily avoid this pitfall.
result? a legal weapon against spam everyone can get behind. it can be mercilessly enforced, with moral and righteous indignation. no grey areas, no controversy. pedophilia is evil, period. jail time anyone?
this is an excellent development. bravo symantec.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It doesn't matter that you didn't know that girl was only 15, you're going to jail for statutory rape. (You may have an out if she *said* she was 19, but that's acting in good faith, not ignorance).
It doesn't matter that you didn't know "soccrkid95" was only 8, you're going to jail for child abuse through exposure to images.
If you want to avoid going to jail, check ID. In other words...Opt-IN.
It's just *snapping fingers* that easy
I don't have any kids (yet), but if/when my kid gets explicit e-mail, you can bet I'm going to hunt down the dirtbag down. If a lawsuit doesn't work, maybe a baseball bat will...
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
@localhost would be even better. If the address is invalid and the spammer is using particularly crappy mail software, you might get the bastard's machine stuck in a mail loop with itself...one less spammer disturbing the rest of us.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Well, let me ask you this... in the long run, what's more harmful for the child, out of the following choices:
1. The child sees a sexual act in a spam message, and you, being the responsible, intelligent and loving parent you are, explain to them what they're seeing, and how it's morally right or wrong.
Or...
2. The government steps in and makes spam e-mail illegal because there's no viable solution for checking the age of an e-mail recipient before sending the message. Given how government generally operates, it should only be 3-5 years before snail-mail junk is outlawed also, leading to several hundreds (if not thousands) of lawsuits within a year. After that, probably another 2-3 years until someone comes up with the idea that since they don't approve of some e-mail or snail-mail they're getting, it's offensive and unwanted, therefore, must be spam... leading to more legislation defining the term "spam" and "unwanted commercial e-mail", eventually leading to the breakdown of even more of individual's basic human rights, especially Freedom of Speech, Press, and (although not specifically mentioned in the Constitution), Privacy. (My sig has particular relevance here.)
Granted, I'm not going to run aroun showing dirty pictures to kids, but in the grand scheme of things, there are only 2 groups of people that can do anything about it -- government, and IT. We're the IT, so let's try to come up with a solution before the government starts.
"It's better to have a gun and not need it than need a gun and not have it." ~ Christian Slater, True Romance
Everyone here familiar with the federal 'Do Not Call' list for telemarketers? Wouldn't it be possible to create a similar product for the web? A 'Do Not Spam' list? Anyone sending say... 100 emails a day would have to cross-reference the recipients addresses with those on the list. And just maybe to support the thing... pay a dollar per account to get your name added... maybe... If you care enough about your kids to keep them from seeing pr0n, pay the buck, if not, don't pay the dollar. Kinda like a mixture of the preposed Public Domain Enhancement Act and the federal 'Do Not Call' list.
Stop the Slashdot effect! Don't read the articles!
"Maybe you don't have a problem with it, but I sure don't want MY kids thinking teenage girls F*ing a horse is OK"
Why would an email convince them its okay?
I gave my daughter an email account on hotmail last year (at age 11). I told her that she will get some email that is disgusting and perverted, and that she should just delete it. If she's puzzled or concerned, she can call me to look it over. And never talk to anyone unless you've met them in person first.
I'm sure she got the spam that you speak of (most of the internet did). It didn't twist her because she has the *foundation* to know right from wrong at age 12.
Its like when she asked to see the Matrix movie (she's in 7th grade), I said "well, it has some rough language". She said "Dad, kids talk that way all the time, I don't use that kind of language". Its just what I wanted to hear and I let her see it.
By age 12, kids really do understand right from wrong. Hell, 100 years ago, 12 and 13 year olds were already married, so the idea that children are fragile is a relatively recent thought (since WWII).
Anyway, if kids think that email confers a degree of acceptability of an action, then I suggest the child has more fundamental problems and probably shouldn't have an unsupervised email account to begin with.