Slashdot Mirror
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"
If you claim to be under 13, does that prevent you from seeing porn, online banking, and one day, online voting?
I already ACT under 13. Does that get me out of spam?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
filtered spam for tweens, no tobacco just junk food spam
Why haven't vigilante hacker-types taken the bad guys off the net yet?
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!
Because if so, I'll gladly become a kid from Michigan.
Send Email to Utah, Go to Jail
The Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy is reporting that two new laws in Utah and Michigan are going into effect next week, creating 'do not email' registries for children's email addresses. According to ISIPP, 'Email marketers who send unpermitted messages to email addresses or domains on the child protection registries in Michigan and Utah face stiff penalties including prison and fines.'" (Note that ISIPP has a vested interest in publicizing these laws, since they offer a service intended to establish that senders are in fact within the law.)
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.
Some Internet safety experts have said anti-spam laws have been difficult to enforce...
Some??? Who's this so called expert that claimed they are easy the enforce?
I didn't especially mind spam, but I sure wished I could opt out of pickled beets.
People ask, "Why just kids?" Spammers want to collect money for doing almost nothing and taking no responsibility for what they do. When they send porn to kids, it makes people angry... very angry.
So when someone is finally taken to trial for sending spam to kids, they won't escape from a jury saying "sorry, I didn't know..."
Spoken like a true spammer. I'm surprised that you didn't say that blocking spam is limiting your "free speach (spammer spelling)"
If you send ads, it's up to you to MAKE SURE those ads go to people that want them. Sending XXX "college amature cam" porn to 10 year olds is not targeting your market, is it?
STFU and get a real job.
--
BMO
Can somebody explain how the registry can be encrypted, and STILL be available to spammers so they know who 'not' to spam?
Spammer> I don't want to get suid... can you tell me who not to spam.
Govt> Sorry, that's classified.
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
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.
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!
What about sicos LOOKING for kids online to do God only knows what to...now they have one centeral clearinghouse - No more spending weeks trolling in "kids" chatrooms any more, this is why I was also against the .kids top level domain thing that came about a couple of years ago.
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*.
I D=3023
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?content
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?
I8-D
It's not a law, and it doesn't ban spam.
i on-registry-law.php
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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.
An European directive (Oct 2003) makes it illegal to send "unsolicited e-mails illegal across member states". http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3005757.stm
Why not make this something global and not only to protect children..?
Although this would not realy solve the problem. ISPs should take more action to prevent that unsolicited e-mails are being send on their subnet anyway.
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
Their deterent is that it costs $0.007 per address to do the listwash. I'm *sure* that noone will produce and sell a CD of all the addresses they have found on the list.
At a previous Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference, I asked this question of the chairman of the FTC, who was speaking about children's privacy on the net. As you might expect, I got no good answer.
It seems to me that the essential quality of being a child that causes us to make special laws protecting them are:
Unfortunately, while those two qualities become less true for us in the physical world when we grow up--we learn how to protect ourselves from in-person assault, and how to avoid going places where we might be assaulted--it's far less true in the online world.
In a sense, we are a whole society of children, living day to day in a world of wonder where there are no parents to tell us wisdom that will keep us from getting into e-trouble for the rest of our e-lives. As such, even if the law does apply only to kids, it should apply to all of us kids, even those of us in real-world adulthood.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
Wow, this gives a whole new reason to claim to be a 13 year old girl on the internet.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
Bingo, right in one.
from cyberspace v engler permanent injunction:
A state's power to regulate commerce may be limited by the right of Congress to regulate interstate commerce. U.S. Const. Art. I, 8, cl. 3. Michigan's effort to regulate what information may be transmitted to Michigan's children, via the Internet, attempts to control Internet communications which might originate within Michigan, in other states, or in other countries. The Commerce Clause precludes the application of state statutes to commerce that commences or occurs outside of a state's borders. American Libraries Association v. Pataki, 969 F.Supp. 160, 175 (S.D. N.Y. 1997).
"[A] statute that directly controls commerce occurring wholly outside the boundaries of a State exceeds the inherent limits of the enacting State's authority and is invalid regardless of whether the statute's extraterritorial reach was intended by the legislature." Healy v. The Beer Institute, et al., 491 U.S. 324, 336 (1989). Thus, regardless of the legislature's intent to regulate solely within the State's own borders, the Act would, in effect, attempt to control communications occurring outside of the State of Michigan. Therefore, Michigan's 1999 Public Act 33 would violate the Dormant Commerce Clause of the United States Constitution, and may not be enforced.
possible examples:
"legalize medical marijuana in hawaii"
"don't drink and drive"
"tobacco kills"