Jail for Selling Email Lists to Spammers

amigoro writes "UK will start jailing the people who trade in email addresses, or any other personal data. The current Data Protection Act only fines people who do that, but the money one can make from trading in personal information was far higher than the measly GBP 5000 one had to pay if caught. The new regulations will result in a two year prison sentence for violating the Act."

Comments

US

[rodgster]

We need an equivalent law here in the US.

Re:US

[BobSutan]

It will never happen so long as the FBI and other government agencies are the buyers of such information. See, since these organizations can't legally snoop in a lot of cases they just buy the info they need from companies that are allowed to do such snooping. Only in America!

Jail Time

[Normal Dan]

It seems everyone these days are too eager to throw people in jail. Two years in jail for a non-violent crime? Two years of your life is a very long time. It's longer than you may think, and spending it in jail doesn't help society very much. Yes, I know it's suppose to be a deterrent, but I think a better deterrent would be a much larger fine, probation, and maybe your email address along with your crime made publicly known. Regardless, I still think we are too quick to just throw people in jail and forget about them.

Re:Jail Time

[iminplaya]

Regardless, I still think we are too quick to just throw people in jail and forget about them.

The creeps making tons of money from the prison industry believe we should feed them even faster. This isn't about punishment, much less rehabilitation. Profit motive is driving it. And the taste of revenge is sweet indeed.

Re:Jail Time

[jfengel]

Fines are problematic as a punishment, because not everybody can pay them. Some of the money has already been spent by the time you get to them, and some has been hidden. You can take everything they have, which is usually less than they made off the crime. There are usually ways to legally hide money even from fines; they're reluctant to take your house, for example (though I gather that the US government has ways around that.)

Jail time is something that people can't miss.

I agree that two years should be a terrifying thing to take from somebody; it's scary that so many people are willing to risk jail time nonetheless.

Punishment is always a problem. Nothing really works universally. Deterrence obviously fails to deter. Rehabilitation also fails more often than it helps. Vengeance comes with its own problems.

Jail terms are always quantifications based on all three factors and more, which will always lead to absurdities of proportion, where some minor crimes get larger sentences than major ones. The laws are always compromises, and the numbers end up as the result of splitting differences and argumentation rather than an understanding of what works.

Re:Jail Time

[MillionthMonkey]

Two years of your life is a very long time. It's longer than you may think, and spending it in jail doesn't help society very much.

On the contrary. Two years is actually a very light sentence for something that impacts society as severly as this, and society benefits greatly during that two year period, because imprisoning a spammer brings huge benefits to society. It's a cheap and effective way to improve the lives of millions of people.

There really aren't that many spammers in the world. It may not seem like it, but that's because the world has a lot of spam- it's a crime that has a huge number of victims by definition. If you consider all the lives that are improved by jailing a spammer, it compares favorably even to jailing violent criminals. There are comparatively few lives that are improved by jailing (say) an average rapist, and even if each potential rape victim's life is improved a lot by the rapist being in jail instead of being free to rape, there's just a few rape victims per rapist (usually less than a hundred). Jailing a spammer can improve the lives of millions of people by a little, and receiving X spam emails is about as bad as being raped (for some value of X). And raping people isn't like spamming- it takes time, effort, and legwork, and the number of people you can rape is limited just by virtue of the fact that it's a difficult crime to computerize. If nothing else, at least one thing you can say about rapists is that they are not as lazy as spammers, and that should really be considered when coming up with sentences for them. Spamming may be as "nonviolent" as selling drugs, accepting bribes, or rigging elections, but spammers still belong in jail. If nothing else, it will prevent them from spamming, in a way that fining them will not. A spammer can cover any fine you impose by further spamming.

Re:Jail Time

[green1]

>> Removing the financial incentive is the only effective way to stop spam

actually, it's worse than that, you have to not only remove the financial incentive, you also have to remove the PERCEIVED financial incentive. the former is actually not that hard, and in some cases is already accomplished. the big problem is that even if people aren't able to make a penny off of spam you will still have people who THINK they can make money off it, and that will continue to cause people to try.

what is needed most is for people to expect to get caught. people do their own risk/benefit analysis and if they think they are likely to get some benefit, and don't think there is any risk they will continue. the way to solve this is to make people think that the risk isn't worth it. which means better investigation, better prosecution, and better computer security making it harder for people to hide the origin of the spam.

Re:Jail Time

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

While I don't think jailing people who illegally trade in personal data (it's not just the spammers themselves affected by this law remember) is too much, your idea that jailing a spammer is more worthy than jailing a rapist or a violent criminal because of the number of lives involved is obscenely stupid. For all the millions of lives impacted by spam, that impact on each is still nothing more than inconvenience. The very concept that a million people's inconvenience is worse than "less than a hundred" people's lives, whether literally ended or "just" destroyed by rape or violent abuse is ridiculous.

Sure, waking up in the morning and finding 70 emails, of which 65 are spam is pretty damn annoying, but it's nothing in the bigger picture. You need to seriously take a step back from the computer and get some fucking perspective.

Re:Jail Time

[fractalus]

While I understand and agree with the general sentiment of your post, I would suggest that there is no X sufficiently large that "receiving X spam emails is about as bad as being raped." To suggest that even a billion emails, enough to leave your personally-owned and lovingly-maintained mail server a smoldering slag heap in the co-lo rack, compares to the very personal, real, and in many ways unfixable feeling of violation that comes with rape is just a bit extreme.

Now, can we get back to lynching spammers?

The price of spam lists

[future assassin]

just went up. Which ofcourse will create more email harvesting.

What about people who inadvertantly give away

[antifoidulus]

email addresses? Such as those who are infected with a harvester. I know that is how my gmail address got out. I didn't receive any spam until I received a mass email inviting all the 200 people who were accepted to the University of Minnesota graduate program in CS to an orientation. At least one of the people who got that must have been infected with spyware that harvests addresses(I know they should know better since they are going to be CS grad students and yet....) and spam started regularly coming into my inbox. It isn't as bad as the 100 or so spams I day I received at my old university address(which I was careless with, but that was before spam became as huge a problem as it is today).

Should the offender be tracked and punished? After all, (s)he gave away my personal info without my consent. Not intentionally and didn't make any money, but its an interesting question nonetheless.

Re:FROSTY PISTOLIERS!

[homey of my owney]

This is of no value. If it was, we wouldn't have Bank robberies (there are laws against it too). As long as there's money in it, and the technology supports it, it'll sadly continue.

Re:FROSTY PISTOLIERS!

[dan828]

You seem to be saying that no laws have value if the behavior that they are intended to prevent still occurs. In addition to bank robbery, that would include murder, rape, theft of any sort, speeding, and cheating on your taxes. Since all of these things still happen, the laws against them must have no value, yes?

What happened to punishment fitting the crime?

[DaedalusLogic]

I hate spam, but traditional jail is excessive for anyone that sells e-mail or private information. I view jail as a place we should send people if the crime can actually cause physical harm to someone's life or limb. Then it makes sense for them to be physically seperated from society. If they commit a crime that's going to cost someone financially, drop a big punitive fine on their ass. Someone who sold private information so they could live the high life with a luxury car and a high rise penthouse should at worst face an entire life of paying back debts. They can live in a fleabag apartment and drive a pinto.

However, I wouldn't be opposed to say a sentence that put them in jail every weekend for two years. They can still try to earn an honest buck, and get a solid reminder of what they did wrong.

No jail sentence will be handed down - Policy

[caveman]

The UK government has recently instructed magistrates and judges not to jail non-violent offenders where possible, due to lack of space in the countries' already crowded prisons.

While the threat of jail is still there, the chances of anyone actually getting a custodial sentence for such crimes is virtually non-existant, when even major crime gets punished with fines and community service.

So, yet another UK law that looks good on paper, but will be as effective as the USA CAN-SPAM laws.

Re:Er, can be

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

Somehow I knew the saving money is saving lives thing would come up. Even if spam really does cost the US 10 billion dollars per year* the fact is that money lost in this manner can never be directly correlated to a cost in lives or emotional damage. Otherwise where would we be? Would someone caught stealing $100 be charged with an equivalent sentence of a double murder? Ridiculous right? How about $1000, $10k, $100k, $1M? At what point is theft equivalent to taking a life, raping someone, or some other violent crime? It's a cliché to say you can't put a value on a life but with good reason. Sure spammers are arseholes and I'll reiterate that I'm not against imprisoning spammers and taking every penny they've made (and more) from them, but nobody will ever convince me that a spammer is as bad or worse than a rapist or a murderer or a wife-beater. I dread the day our society is so fucked up that we can equate monetary loss on the same scale as physical or sexual abuse.

I'll get down off my soapbox now.

*: I suspect those figures are entirely bogus though. Most likely calculated in the same style that the RIAA uses to say that piracy costs them 100 trillion dollars per nanosecond or whatever they're claiming these days.