Slashdot Mirror
UK Anti-Spam Laws Criticised
stripyd writes "The Guardian has an article
about the ineffectiveness of British anti-spam regulations. Asside from the limited penalties,
the Office of the Information Commissioner have yet to actually hand out a fine. From personal
experience, the OIC aren't good at answering email on queries regarding the law, their web site, or suggestions that the current procedure of tracking down, printing out and mailing off (with a stamp!) a five-page pdf form to report miscreants be streamlined. The form itself is good for a few yuks, until you remember your taxes are paying for it to be outsourced to private sector hosting."
Here we can mail spam sent by Belgians (or spamvertising Beglian website) to the economical inspection, and they do investigate (they even called me once for more information). Foreigners getting Belgian spam (not many of those, I guess) can report them as well, fwiw. Their address is inspec dot eco at mineco dot fgov dot be
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It's not just limited penalties: it's also limited scope, in that the only spam prohibited is spam to personal addresses. I actually get more spam to my work address than my personal addresses, and am rather unamused by this... cop-out. ("Loophole" isn't quite the right word, because it's intentional).
Especially since it's not even being enforced.
Is there any such thing as a British libertarian? :P
As for the site, it says nothing about the Reg 22 in question, a search only finds the same letter in Word format. However it does look like they spent a pretty penny on their web designer. That's more comforting to the public than enforcing the law, I guess.
I did not realize that spammers took themselves this seriously. And spam-gangs? What is this world(wide web) coming to?
42
"Asside from the limited penalties, the Office of the Information Commissioner have yet to actually hand out a fine."
Most of the spam offences are committed outside of the UK. I consider this a localised solution to a global problem.
And this compares to the highly successful anti-spam laws of which country, exactly? (Disclaimer: I have a vested interest, I the anti-spam development manager at MessageLabs)
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
Laws are useless unless they are enforced. There is no deterrent if would-be lawbreakers know they either won't get caught, or if caught, won't be significantly punished.
It's therefore relevant in planning anti-Spam legislation that the legislators consider how they can follow up on whatever laws they draft to make them more than a 'toothless tiger'.
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It all gets rather too much at times.
More seriously, I'd say in the UK we have more trouble with semi-legitimate opt-out marketing than pure spam, almost all of which seems to come from the USA (yes, re earlier story, particularly Comcast and the baby-Bells)
There are so many sites in UK cyberspace geared towards getting email addresses for "free newsletters", and any club or association seems to want to send emails with a bare minimum of content and masses of advertising added. This I see as an attempt to legitimise spam, rather than mass-mailing, people are paying asociations and clubs to sell their products for them. Affiliate programs suck, and so many firms have been founded to do just this in the UK.
How many times must I tell them? I already have enough Tea.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Maybe they got their code logic wrong:
m mer);
if (potentialSpam.EmailAddress.endsWith(*.uk))
{
id(potentialSpam.PotientialSpammer);
fine(potentialSpam.PotientialSpammer.potentialSpa
}
else
{
System.out.println("Does not concern us, processing next message...");
}
Just J/king
In The Netherlands, you can report spam on-line as well at the Spam Klacht (lit.: "spam complaint") website. This is an official website of the OPTA organization, which monitors and control telecommication in The Netherlands. Note that the link to the Spam Klacht website is even an SSL link.
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It's quite amusing that while on the one hand expecting ISPs to keep e-mail logs for several years for "security" purposes, another branch of the same government is ensuring that those logs are so full of spam-related noise that it would be infeasible to analyse them in most practical cases.
Of course, anti-spam legislation is only effective against "legitimate" slimeball businesses. And at present, their contribution is minimal compared to criminal slimeball businesses. The latter cannot only be addressed by technical fixes, after which point legal solutions may have a chance of working.
The sad thing is that however strong and well supported the laws are by the community, it's probably not going to make one bit of difference to the amount of crap an individual receives. For a start, UK laws can't stop foreign spammers. Secondly, they are likely to be difficult to enforce even if we know who the culprits are. We have drug laws and anti-terrorism laws in Britain, but does that mean that they are no longer a problem? I think not. IMHO the best way to avoid spam is to take precautions and get some good filters.
You've probably noticed that people's noses get bigger as they get older. That's because old people are huge liars.
> From personal experience, the OIC aren't good at
> answering email on queries regarding the law
My personal experience was going to their site to look for guidelines on the use of cookies and the collection of anonymous data. Finding lots of "guidelines" about stuff (which are basically extracts of legal documents it seems), but nothing that seemed relevant, I mailed them my question. Three weeks later I got a reply, which was at least relevant, if amazingly long and almost as confusing as the other stuff on their site that I couldn't undertand either.
They've got a hell of a long way to go in my opinion. During the trial of Ian Huntely, the police even admitted they were confused about the DPA! What hope is there for the rest of us?
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Good point. Some people always act (or, more to the point, talk about acting) from the point of view of wanting to police the world and enforce "truth, justice and [their] way".
Some of us just want to make a practical start on the problem...
That is, when some story comes up about spam and a govt. official is interviewed, they can point to the spam law being passed.
See also Data Protection Act, Freedom of Information Act.
just keep it to yourself?
Is a paper tiger. It was designed that way. You only really find this out when you try to invoke the Data Protection Act 1998 against a data conroller company, and find that it's not designed to protect you, it's designed to safeguard companies holding your data from you.
The reason the UK spam laws are weak is not a coincidence either. The UK government uses the electoral register to sell your data (regardless of whether you "opt out") to third party marketing companies to get revenue.
It's not freedom of information as you might know it, it's a case of "do as I say, not as I do".
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
If we can make it worse with out sourcing it's already in India.
--- [Insert intresting Sig here]
We need a new, pithy name for these. Getting people to sign up to receive spam is one of the spammers' cleverest tricks. And it works too well, alas.
just let spammers pick it up and report themselves :-P
here goes: inspec.eco@mineco.fgov.be
Maybe this would generally be a cool idea: post honeypot-addresses all over the net, and cause spammers to spam people who CAN and WILL do something about that...
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this 120 chars is too small to contain.
95% of the spam I get comes from outside the UK so its out of the ability of the UK Government to do anything about it.
Yes, but do you have No Tea?
Otherwise, you can never get the last bit of fluff....
www.eFax.com are spammers
The thing that worried me most in the report was the claim (ok it was by the boy Sunner from MessageLabs) that 90% of email would be spam or viruses by 2005. I'm sure if they counted message size they'd find the majority of email is already viruses.
Latest spammer trick to defeat Baysian filters... correctly spelt spam with real content before the advertising pitch.
Arguably, a spammer is breaching the Computer Misuse Act 1990
This provides:
3.--(1) A person is guilty of an offence if-- (a) he does any act which causes an unauthorised modification of the contents of any computer; and(b) at the time when he does the act he has the requisite intent and the requisite knowledge.
(2) For the purposes of subsection (1)(b) above the requisite intent is an intent to cause a modification of the contents of any computer and by so doing--
(c) to impair the operation of any such program or the reliability of any such data.
*Any* email will "modify the contents of the computers" it is delivered to or passed through.
If the email has been crafted (e.g with nonsense keywords, hidden text, misleading subjects, forged headers) to avoid a spam filter then it could be held to "impair the operation of a program" - i.e. the spam filter.
This to me looks like a section 3 offence, which carries a five year sentence.
I'm not sure how you'd go about making a complaint though..
They, probably, need a paper complaint because they can't prosecute without it -- law enforcement is backwards that way -- justices still wear gowns, for crying out loud! Given that, hosting the PDF through the private company is almost certainly cheaper for the taxpayers.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.