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."

Comments

Better in Belgium

[Halo1]

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

Limited scope

[pjt33]

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).

Compared to the successful anti-spam laws where?

[evilandi]

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)

Laws are useless without enforcement

[lewko]

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'.

British spam

[CdBee]

"Get your online next-day tea supplies here"
"How to understand Americans - get the guidebook!"
"Sizzling Shots of the Queen - Join today!"

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.

Also in The Netherlands

[ControlFreal]

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.

Policy conflict...

[cardpuncher]

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.

What's the point?

[neilmoore67]

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.

Re:What's the point?

[Andy_R]

Actually, I've found the threat of the law to be quite effective in cutting down the spam that I get. I have quite often I've mailed the head of legitimate organisations that have spammed me because some random 3rd party has mistakenly signed up an address in my domain to their lists, and got some pretty grovelling replies.

I'm just about to send of my first dozen forms to the OIC, and as with any UK government department, all you need to do to get action is threaten them with their own regulatory body to get action.

Also, I've picked my targets carefully, some big names that have ignored written warnings.

Top of my hit list are:

xmr3.com (uk bulk mailer that pretends it's legitimate)

Yahoo.co.uk (those adverts at the top and bottom of yahoogroups mails are illegal, but Yahoo think they are above the law)

Ticketweb.co.uk (claim that every time you buy from them they have thr right to start samming you again)

- Andy_R

Email queries to the OIC

[gilgongo]

> 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?

The Office of the Information Commissioner

[BillsPetMonkey]

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".