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.

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

[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.