Slashdot Mirror
Lawmakers Try to Protect Kids From Spam
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "Some states have moved to shield children from email peddling porn, alcohol and other adults-only products, the Wall Street Journal reports. Critics say the laws, which establish a registry of kids' email addresses, are unfair to marketers and could create security risks. The debate echoes earlier discussion about a proposed do-not-spam national registry that the Can-Spam Law urged, but which the FTC nixed. This time, though, the registries are moving forward on a state-by-state basis, and facing court challenges from the adult entertainment industry." From the article: "Few email addresses have been placed on the state registries so far. Earlier this week, Utah's registry had 1,992 addresses, and 62 schools had registered their domain names to block emails to student accounts. About 160 companies had submitted their email lists for screening. In Michigan, 3,658 email addresses have been registered, along with 41 school domains. About 170 marketers had applied for screening."
More laws.
I wonder how many sex offenders work for government.
Actually, I find this really overreaching legislation unacceptable for a free society. When you become a parent, you must accept the priviledge of parenting -- don't push it off on me.
When you tax me, regulate me and force me to monitor what your children are doing, you are putting the brunt of parenting on me. I don't want it. I'm responsible and have no had kids before I was ready. Don't ask me to help you, I don't want to.
I want to run my business utilizing every right I was born with -- including speech. If you don't want my e-mails, you can run a white list and bounce everything not in it. Problem solved, by the free market.
I want to run my life without paying for the legal system required to enforce these tyrannical laws. I have no desire to put another lawyer in the district attorney's office. I have no desire to put another cop in a nice office in order to do a parent's job. I have no desire to put another judge on the bench to take away the freedoms of the citizens put in from of them.
Here's a guide to life:
1. Don't have kids until you can support them yourself (including paying for school, food, clothing and shelter).
2. Join a church or community group focused on family. Help your neighbors with kids and they'll help you.
3. Understand that raising a child means having one parent at home. If you have a child, stop spending money on toys and vacations and new cars and new clothes. Focus your money on your child's present and future.
4. Understand that raising a child means constant care. Don't let your child go anywhere without knowing where and with whom. If one parent is home, this is much easier.
If you can't understand these simple procedures (learned over millenia), don't have kids. I don't want to pay for them, I don't want to raise them, and I don't want to provide free daycare for them. It isn't my kid.
It will only work for senders in the US, and that's assuming it would work at all. For the rest of the world, it's a free list of valid email accounts.
...will be for the list to get into the hands of one child molestor.
Then the whole affair will be killed faster than you can say "Don't touch me there, Father Geoghan".
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
So think twice before "death to all marketers".
While protecting children from spam is a noble goal, Utahs method of forcing companies to have a third party check their address databases against blacklists (and having to pay a lot for that) will only catch a small part of the spam, while resulting in a giant overhead.
What worries me most is the definition of "inappropriate sales pitches", which can be heavily fined. What is inappropriate? I run a website for free language training, aimed at adults and kids. What happens if a kid requests the newsletter, but the kids school or parents have put its email address on the blacklist? If some right wing christian decides that teaching children the french names of bodyparts is indecent, will I be fined for making an "inappropriate sales pitches"? Smells like CDA.
Chriss
--
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I don't know why you would bother creating a registry of kid's names & schools that is most likely to be unsecure, infringing on privacy rights, burdening the innocent individual, and is impossible to verify.
How about just stopping the spam with huge fines for the offenders and/or putting them out of business permanently?
I would like to know one person here who thinks that spam emails are a legitimate way to do business.
It is like the electronic equivalent of harassment and email vandalism.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Just some short points:
1. Don't have kids until you can support them yourself (including paying for school, food, clothing and shelter).
The average cost of raising a child is $250,000.
2. Join a church or community group focused on family. Help your neighbors with kids and they'll help you.
The church essentially does what you advocate against the government doing. namely, raising peoples children for them.
3. Understand that raising a child means having one parent at home. If you have a child, stop spending money on toys and vacations and new cars and new clothes. Focus your money on your child's present and future.
Raising children has always entailed both parents working. The single working parent was a concept largely confined to 1950's america. Across the globe and throughout time, both parents have usually needed to work to support a family.
4. Understand that raising a child means constant care. Don't let your child go anywhere without knowing where and with whom. If one parent is home, this is much easier.
See previous point. Also along these lines, in the past, children often worked from quite a young age, usually alongside their parents. The modern school system is in essence an alternative to this, enabling parents to work, without simultaniously supervising their children.
May the Maths Be with you!
After all, having an available registry of confirmed emails of children is a god send for many marketers. Nice of the government to subsidize the market research so that advertising agencies can be 100% sure that their spam for toys, or candy, or xbox games is going to the target market!
Sure, the list is only supposed to be available to "authorized third party auditors" or translation: a bunch of minimum wage data entry people. Which means that it will be available to just about anyone willing to pay a few bucks! And don't expect this info not to be given to military recruiters, or anyone the government WANTS to market to your children.
And marketers are not the worst type of people who could have this information!
This is absurd, if a school decided to implement an email system, then they should have looked into investing in a filtering system to go along with it.
It isn't the governments job to refine the processes and products of the private industry, which is essentially what they are doing. (more and more every day)
They have essentially said "This email thing would be alot better tool/product if we modified it like *this*". But wait! Email was never their technology in the first place! Why would we need them to aid/fix it?
We have all these politicians that are so devoted to their capitalism, yet they can't seem to understand the basic premise of it. If there is a wide demand for a product or change, somebody will supply it. The only thing that can stop the process from working is outside intervention such as this. Assuming this government solution works, they have just effectively halted research into new technologies and solutions to the problem in the private sector.
Common politicians, if you are going to be capitalist, then for FSM's sake could you allow capitalism to do it's thing!
Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead!
Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...
The EFF has a long history of being on the wrong side of the spam problem. They showed their true colors when they joined spammers in their suit to overturn the laws designed to help stop spam.
When people ask me why I refuse to join the EFF, I just point at their spam policies.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
As for keeping it secure. Gee, what would pedo do with a list of email adresses when during the same breakin or electronic theft he can get the complete details of every kid? The state already keeps full listing of every kid in the state, adding a list of emails is not going to be any big deal.
Discuss wether you want or do not want a do no spam list but do not make stupid alarmist posts about things wich are clearly explained in the fucking article. Why does slashdot not have a mod option "RTFA".
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
You know, oddly enough, I've only ever had a problem with pornographic spam on the accounts I've, er, "misused." I've run my own email servers for quite awhile and never really had any major problems with those that I, well, never used to sign up for porn--including the "free" email accounts I don't physically control.
With limited exceptions of scatterbombing, they gotta get your address from somewhere... Ahem.
Look! We pay for, or someone pays for, our email service. It is NOT for "marketters" to exploit. It would be a different story if email wasn't a "pay for" service. Internet access and ultimately email 99% of the time falls neatly into that category and should be EXEMPT from marketters demanding "fairness." The fact that email marketting ever got established as "common" is unfair to those who pay for their email service.
I believe that this is officially called the "Encourage Pedophiles to Start Marketing Companies Act of 2006"
Well, lets see. You have the email addresses of millions of kids in a single location (well, a single location for each state at least). Anyone can get the list, otherwise small legit companies won't know who to exclude. Then my friend in Nigeria gets them, and cons kids into giving out mommy and daddy's credit card info. What a great idea.
Lighten up. Its only a post.
I know 'kids' in their 20s who still feel the need to hide their lifestyles from their parents. Sheltering children sets up for a lifetime of dishonesty between parents and children.
Product marketers know kids are impressionable. Companies like McDonald's aggressively target kids to get them to see McDonald's as a fun place to visit and thus consume their products. Toy makers and other companies use gorilla like tactics to aggressively market to children.
Create a registry of children's email addresses and suddenly you provide fuel for lots of child-direct marketing involving these corporate preditors.
There are also huge security concerns. If this email list gets leaked or hacked and suddenly sexual preditors have a long list of children to try and prey on.
This all boils down to parents and their need to be more actively involved in their childs life. In ALL honestly, CHILDREN SHOULD NOT HAVE THEIR OWN EMAIL ADDRESS, PERIOD!
I mean, perhaps by the time they hit high school, most children are well aware of what Viagra and have probaly seen porn anyways, so lets not throw them in the same category. High school age kids are not innocent these days.
But handing a 6 year old an email account is just opening them to the kind of things parents dread. Porn and sexual preditors and other questionable content. Children under the age of 12 simply shouldn't have their own email address. Let emails go to their parents and let the parent's filter out the emails and let their kids know if they have one written to them personally. Thats the most common sense thing to do.
I don't understand how a law can prevent children from being emailed porn or sexually related content. US is so hyped about making laws to protect kids or people from this or that, its turning their society into a group of people that can't act on their own behalf or take responsibility for their actions. Some one because of a victim of something, and suddenly they need to point fingers and use others a scapegoats for their own lack of judgement.
Perhaps the law should charge parents with negligence for allowing 6 year olds to browse the internet and send and receive emails unattended. As much as it must be a parents worst nightmare for a child to meet a stranger through the internet, a parent should be slapped with a fine in that case for not being more pro-actively involved in their childs internet access. Don't put a computer in a child's room, and don't let them access the internet unattended or supervised. It IS as easy as that, period! You don't need to waste millions in tax payer's money to create a superficial law that won't protect children in the long run.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Answer: The parents. It's their fucking job!
I'm getting so ill hearing all the "We gotta protect the children!" crap. When will people take responsability for their own godamn lives and stop trying to foist bad laws on the rest of us?
Yeah, I know. Wishful thinking.
US legal system: By Lawyers for Lawyers.
I agree with most of your post, but then I read the following:
Kids walk around dressed in mismatched, mis-sized clothes. Where di they get them? Most of them don't have jobs, so it must be dear-old-mom-and-dad who are letting them dress like hoodlums, tramps, and reprobates.
What does this have to do with anything? You think the style of kids clothing is a problem? They aren't dressing like "hoodlums, tramps, and reprobates" because those people can't afford new clothing in the latest style or fad. Even if kids do dress like tramps, who cares? Do you really judge a person by their clothes? If so, you've chose a foolish metric. I know both children and adults of all levels of intelligence and responsibility and let em tell you, the only correlation between clothing and either characteristic is as imposed by employers due to social expectations. Perpetuating the belief that people have to dress in whatever fashion is similar to our grandparents is in no way productive. Give it a rest.