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New Michigan Law Means Kids Can Opt Out of Spam

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the less-pr0n-for-kids dept.

tekiegreg writes "Thanks to a new Michigan Law, parents can now opt their kids out of Spam. One wonders whether or not such severe penalty will make Spammers think twice ($30,000 fine and 3 yrs/jail)." I wonder how much legislation will actually help keep kids from being spammed, but if it works, I'm happy to say I'm under age 13 if it means I get less spam.

3 of 183 comments (clear)

  1. They don't ... by dustmite · · Score: 4, Informative

    This is something false that people think is true because it keeps getting repeated over and over by people on sites like slashdot. The US have the most spammers in the world. Here are the top ten spammers:

    United States: 42.11 per cent
    South Korea: 13.43 per cent
    China (including Hong Kong): 8.44 per cent
    Canada: 5.71 per cent
    Brazil: 3.34 per cent
    Japan: 2.57 per cent
    France: 1.37 per cent
    Spain: 1.18 per cent
    United Kingdom: 1.13 per cent
    Germany: 1.03 per cent

    Within the US, IIRC, the number one spamming state is Florida.

    One reason this falsety spread though is that Chinese server admins used to have very lax attitudes to open relays, which meant that the (mostly American) spammers often used Chinese servers to send their spam. Russia comes in because Russian mafia hacker groups are known to set up botnets - armies of infected zombie XP machines connected to the Net - and they then sell the use of the botnets for doing things like sending spam to (mostly American) spam groups.

    IMO blaming the Chinese and Russians in these cases for spam is like blaming the manufacturer of a gun used in a murder, instead of the person who decided to pull the trigger. You don't fix a problem by blocking the symptoms - you go to the source of the problem.

  2. This Law Is Evil by Sarbandia · · Score: 4, Informative

    I can't believe no one has mentioned this yet. This law really does abridge freedom of speech - if you send an email with a link to a site with credit card advertisments to an email on this list, you could concievably be thrown in *jail*.

    http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentI D=3023

  3. Re:Oh Great by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    From their website:

    https://www.protectmichild.com/answer.html?src=q&i d=4

    QUESTION: How is the privacy of registrants maintained?

    ANSWER: The security of a list of child-accessible e-mail addresses was of great concern when designing the Protect MI Child Registry. Registered e-mail addresses are stored in such a way that the addresses will not be revealed, even if the system's database is compromised. Even the state does not have access to the registered e-mail addresses.