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FTC Threatens Spyware Distributors With Prison
Federal regulator Mark Pryor, in a Senate Commerce Committee hearing, has stated that spyware distributors should face harsher penalties than fees. His solution: imprisonment. "Federal Trade Commissioner William Kovacic said most wrongdoers in the spyware arena 'can only be described as vicious organized criminals. Many of most serious wrongdoers we observed in this area, I believe, are only going to be deterred if their freedom is withdrawn,' so it's important for the FTC to collaborate on its cases with criminal law enforcement authorities, Kovacic said."
i'm certainly no fan of windows or MS, but MS products are one of the few things you can count on not containing spyware as such. yes they do have activation, no it doesn't spy on your personal information.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Spyware provides me with some extra cash on the side. So I don't really mind it so much. People callin me up every so often sayin their computer is running slow and they get all these ads that they don't want. Fix it up, and make some money.
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This is a really good idea. Spyware makers are the worst in terms of computer crime.
I remember, not too long ago, when pricks around the world wrote dialers for people with dial-up connections. Dialers, once installed, would route someone's call to their ISP through some insanely far-away place (usually pimples in the pacific) with insanely high long-distance costs. The people who wrote the software would then split the profits made from the long-distance call with the corrupt operator of the far-away places' phone company. The effect was to leave people out-of-pocket by a huge amount (hundreds or thousands of dollars). If the target got the long-distance charge removed by the local phone company, the local phone company would have to eat the charges.
The point of the above is to underline the character of crimes committed: it's pure theft. Modern spyware either seals people's browsing habits or personal information, so it's a little less direct, but it's still a theft.
I think spyware writers are more foul than virus writers: while virus writers do what they do for the technical thrill and bother a lot of people in the process, spyware writers do it just to get money.
Their motives are base, their methods are underhanded, and they should go to jail.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
Easy: throw the CEO in prison, or the board of directors, or other folks in upper management who're responsible for the crimes the company committed.
FWIW, this seems like a good idea, too. I'm not a fan of prison terms in general, but I also think that they're quite good at deterring white-collar crime (fraud etc., as opposed to blue-collar crime where you actually have to get your hands dirty - armed robbery, battery, and so on). The problem with penalty fees is that they're paid by the company, not the individuals who're actually responsible - so even if worst comes to worst and if the company will go bankrupt, they'll just go and start another one.
It's like punishing mafia hitmen but letting the actual dons go free - they'll just hire new hitmen and continue like before. But as soon as the directors of a spyware company are *personally* threatened with punishment for their deeds (and let's face it, it *is* upper management that is responsible for these things: the company does not have a life of its own that goes beyond the people working in/for it, and doesn't just decide to commit crimes on its own), most likely will stop and comply with the letter of the law, at least.
butter the donkey
.. in order for this to work, they need a clear, concise definition of what Spyware is. As somebody else already said, it gets kind of murky when they have end user agreements which trick the user into agreeing to accept the spyware as a stipulation for using the program. Realistically, 3/4 of people don't sit there and read all the fine print in the end user agreement. If I wanted to legally get spyware onto somebody's computer, all I would have to do is make the end user agreement longer than a War and Peace novel, and then put the 'spyware clause' somewhere in the middle. One final note: I don't agree with the prison time part - this seems too kind to me. Why can't we bring back cruel and unusual punishments? If you were to threaten to flog the people responsible for spyware, that would be an even bigger deterrent.