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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"
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
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
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.
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*.
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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.