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E.U. Employers To Be Held Liable For Porn Spam?

Posted by timothy on from the hostile-environment-defined dept.

Cowards Anonymous writes "Yahoo News has a story about a study of Europe's new anti-spam legislation. The overly broad wording of the legislation, according to the study, could allow employees to sue employers for not doing enough to stop porn spam. Businesses could be sued by their workers for allowing a hostile work environment. The author of the study advises companies running email servers to use filtering technology, and warn employees about the sometimes sleazy content of spam."

7 of 314 comments (clear)

  1. SMTP must die! by LostCluster · · Score: 5, Interesting

    E-mail, as we know it today, has got to go. Non-authenticatable sending is a bug, not a feature. For as long as businesses allow incoming SMTP e-mail, their employees will always be exposed to all forms of Spam, including pornographic.

    So, if the law basically makes it impossible to run an SMTP-based e-mail system in a business, that could be just the knockout blow it takes for businesses to finally see an incentive on picking a tigher protocol that allows better tracing of senders.

    1. Re:SMTP must die! by gcaseye6677 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That's because there is a cost to the sender involved in sending snail mail. Sure you can send a lot of it without a return address, but you are limited by how much money you can spend on postage. SMTP does not have this limitation which is why spam is such a problem. Also, the penalties for mail fraud are so severe that most people won't even try it.

    2. Re:SMTP must die! by lcsjk · · Score: 5, Funny

      Try sending 100,000 letters without postage and you will see how effective the USPS spam blocker is!

    3. Re:SMTP must die! by Cruciform · · Score: 5, Interesting

      If we started slapping "Return to sender" stickers on flyers and other unaddressed promotional garbage, would it actually make it back to the companies? Or would the postal service just dispose of it.

  2. i'd roll back to etch-a-sketches by geekbruin · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Sounds like that is going to put a huge amount of burden on the companies. If I were running my own private business, I'd be inclined to unplug everyone's network connections and hand out typewriters. I don't know how strict the legistlation is, but it sounds to me that this might promote anti-technology.

  3. Very Sticky Subject by Prince+Vegeta+SSJ4 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "European employers must be aware of the risk of new computer-related liabilities," said the researcher for the University of Amsterdam's Institute for Information Law.

    "An important example of such a potential new liability is the risk of being held accountable for not protecting employees against unsolicited pornographic e-mail."

    This could encourage companies from denying Internet access to employees, after all why risk sexual harassment lawsuits for something that is so difficult to stop.

    On one hand you can have an opt-in list for employees, where someone must "allow" a person to send mail to an inbox. I use this for my Dads email account due to all of the spam (however, being his personal and business email address, I must constantly monitor the mail so that nothing important gets caught in the SPAM TRAP)

    Which leads to the other hand, opt-in limits your ability to do certain things, for instance if you pass out business cards with an email or want legitimate, but currently unkown people to contact you it is a pain in the ass.

  4. Companies can make spam a non-issue for employees by ron_ivi · · Score: 5, Interesting
    At the company I work, we make it easier. Everyone can have 2 (or more if needed) email addresses. One for reliable business partners, and a second one for less trusted business partners, mailing lists, etc. For example our affiliate manager may actually need to contact porn sites.

    For another example, our CEO wants to sign up to mailinglists of all our partners, competitors, etc. Both use their "secondary" email address for this spam-ridden mail.

    Most of the "legimite" "corporate" use of email doesn't actually get your email address listed with porn spammers. People just like giving out their email addresses to everyone, and that's what gets them in spam-trouble. By giving a second throwaway account, most people's primary account stays nice and spam-clean.