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New Michigan Law Means Kids Can Opt Out of Spam
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.
Interesting that it's for 'protecting the children'. Why not just let all Michigan residents opt-out of spam?
It's almost as if the legislators are making a compromise...
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
So if I'm somewhere else, say orbiting in the space station, do I have to now lookup every country, every state and province, to see whom I can email or not?
Hey. I love protecting the kids. Perhaps we should all get a law. I'd also like to grow hair and be taller. But until leglislators can change the fabric of reality, these things are not going to happen. Makes for nice press. Little else.
Just How Many Stooges were in the Three Stooges?
All the spammers in Russia and China are shaking in their boots worried about a Michigan law.
oh the oppression!
Uh huh. So a huge list is compiled of all the underage kids. Yeesh. I'm sure the spammers will love that list. I can't even fathom the sheer volume of spam they will get once they aren't underage anymore.
If the sender of each illegal message in my inbox actually got prosecuted according to existing laws - there could me millions of dollars in fines. Nothing is consistently enforced though - so its pretty much as if the existing laws don't really exist. I don't see why this one will be any different.
While I do think it's a good start, I question the other ways kids are NOT protected ... namely in the educational institutions.
We allow advertising for Snickers, M&Ms, Coke & Pepsi all over our high and junior high schools, and allow Universities (like the former U of Minnesota - now a research facility instead of a school) to sell students personal information to any bank or credit card company we choose.
Spam is hardly a threat compared to corporate "education".
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -- "Step Right Up", Tom Waits
Yeah! The anonymous coward above is correct. As a 13 year old I have no conception, or the ability, of pressing the 'Yes' button to enter a porn site. All I see is the 'No' button which leads me to Yahoo or a Disney site. I don't understand how you adults pull off such magic to be able to mask the 'Yes' button from our collective horny teen eyes. Can you do the same magic on my sister!
I love an ideological person, and even more so, an ideological politician. People that think they truly can change the world. However, the line between ideological and naive is a fine one, and one that was certainly crossed here:
"From my perspective as a parent, I'm horrified by what comes in" to her three children's e-mail accounts, Gov. Jennifer Granholm said during a news conference Thursday. "This will put an end, we hope, to inappropriate e-mail getting to our children."
It will not put an end to it. I guarantee that. Spam is not like a do-not-call list. Fly by night Chinese penis enlargement spam companies don't care what lists various states in the US have to opt out of, not to mention many spammers in the US.
Yes, this will open up a large DB of childrens e-mails, which won't be targetted by hackers. They will be targetted by pedophiles posing as children themselves. Worse, even by just knowing the state, pedophiles in Michigan know their victims will be local. One would hope that the state is smart enough to at the very least post some dummy honeypot e-mails up in order to catch such predators.
But, no, I think they are too naive even for that. If you don't want your kid getting spam, give them a GMail account. I get the most horrible spam of anyone I know, almost 200 a day, and none of them cutsey ones. I forward through GMail as my filter. In this entire year, about 5 made it through. Government can't solve all the problems. Spam is a special problem that I really don't think any single government could solve, and if they could solve it collaboratively, the risk to civil liberties would, in my mind, probably outweigh any benefit.
The answer to technological problems is a technological solution. You can't legislate away the flaws in the current e-mail system... but you can always program a better solution. This law would be similar to Michigan making it illegal to use someone else's password, and doing so by making a giant list of the passwords everyone uses.
So the Gov. knows how to basically use e-mail. Now she thinks she's an expert on Internet security and privacy? When will politicians realize that, for the most part, they are tech amatures, and really need to call in the experts for solid advise?
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It's not a law, and it doesn't ban spam.
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It bans some email. It doesn't tell you which email; you have to guess. Lots of spam is ok under the statute. It's not limited to bulk email, one is enough. Have you verified everyone on your contacts list isn't actually a michigan minor? How exactly did you verify that? It's not limited to commercial email.
http://www.isipp.com/michigan-email-child-protect
There's the text, which was missing from the main post. Do you understand it? Does your lawyer understand it? Are you in compliance?
The statute is not a law. One of the basic rules of american law established by Marbury v Madison is that an unconstitutional statute is not law.
This statute appears to be unconstitutional for the reasons discussed in Cyberspace v Engler, which stuck down Michigan's previous attempt at banning the internet because of the kiddies.
http://www.cyberspace.org/lawsuit/
Some of the fun provisions in the act:
they can make you come to michigan with all your business records to answer questions.
They can seize your computers.
If they were serious about protecting kids, they wouldn't be charging a fee to check the list.
Oh and it's not just parents who can add names - government officials can add kids' names, probably without telling them.
For fun, check the linking policy.
http://www.michigan.gov/som/0,1607,7-192-26915-20
It's a shakedown.
It's not constitutional.
It doesn't protect against spam.
It bans some email but not others.
Spam is a real problem. This isn't a real solution.
Personally, getting on the federal and state do not call lists has been great for me.
This isn't like that.
Don't be a dupe.
This is what we fought Reno v ACLU for - to keep the government from shutting down the internet.
I've heard there's this thing called "parenting". Any ideas?
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
This is american tax payers money at work :) you pay millions to ppl to make laws which are useless...
Taking this money and spending it on technological solutions to the spam probelm...
Even requiring isps/computer manufactures to preinstall basic antivirus would work better by removing all the machines that are used as proxies to send spam and other bs...
Visit my site @ http://www.madtorrent.com
Agreed.
I just set up an email account for my son, 7, so he can send mail to his grandparents and practice typing. He's got a nice gmail account and the Mac OS X parental controls whitelists who he can send and receive mail from. Any other addresses that go to his account or that he tries to send to are forwarded to me so I can add them to the list if I see fit.
Safari similarly limits the websites he can go to so he can't go directly to gmail to bypass the whitelist.
Government doesn't need to protect kids from spammers. We're all perfectly capable of doing it ourselves. The problem is that most people really don't care - they say they care but they don't care enough to act - to spend $20 on software that will do what this bill does, or to spend an hour learning how to secure their kids machine.