Slashdot Mirror
Europe Passes Pro-spam Law
Richard Jones wrote in
to send us a story from news.com talking about the
latest developments in
European Spam Law.
They basically ruled it legal. (CT:The U-Haul is returned, we have
a lot of unpacking to do, but next week should be back to normal
around here.)
Hello all,
I'm wondering why this EU law is labeled as being "Pro SPAM". It just isn't Anti-SPAM. The opt-out system is entirely voluntary, and it doesn't prevent any of the member countries to outlaw spam anyway. At most, it's a missed opportunity to regulate spam, leaving the Net to fix the problem by itself. I actually like what they've done here...
Levien
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
... please just let us know.
If you'd prefer that we not sleep with your girlfriend again, please drop us a note.
If you'd rather not have your house robbed again, please call this number.
If you'd prefer that we not steal your services again, please reply to this address.
No, "opt out" is not an option.
My problem with laws banning spam is that it is not clear to me that you can draw a clear line between spam and non-spam email. You could define it as any email sent to more than one person that was unsolicited, but that strikes me as too draconian. I could come up with cases where there are legitimate reasons to send out mass-mailings, and it seems excessive, to have the governmnet step in every time you have to hit the delete key. Yes spam is a problem, but I wonder whether banning it would really accomplish anything, and whether it could be done without stifling free speech. Anybody have a definition that would prevent abuses without turning every mass email message into a lawsuit?
Nothing wrong with the idea of consumers being allowed to "opt-out" of receiving junk. Except that it just plain and simply does not work, and I suspect that in five to ten years the European Parliament will be realising that they have made an awful mistake.
Firstly, there is no guarantee at all that a spammer will remove you from his/her list. In fact, the opposite seems to be the case for most spammers.
Secondly, it requires effort, time (and consequently money) from the consumer to figure out how to get their email address removed from a spammers list. This would be OK if it was just a small handful of lists ever, but most spammers seem to each have their own "remove" list, and with each new spam mail I get, there seems to be a new address to reply to to "remove". So in reality consumers would probably be doing the "remove me" thing several times a week. Also, many of the "remove me" email addresses are simply bogus addresses.
A centralised "remove" database does not work either. The majority of spammers ignore this information, since they don't really give a rats ass if you don't want to receive their junk. Some spammers may use this information to *create* lists.
Most spammers will NOT remove you from their lists if you reply and type "remove" - on the contrary, replying often simply lets the spammer know which email addresses are active. Thus it is "unsafe" to "hit reply and type remove", so I do not do it.
As for "legit" companies, well, legalising spam, including the opt-out approach, also allows basically any company with access to your email address to spam you. So you can be sure that every few days yet another company will have "purchased" your email address as part of some spammer database and will be sending you advertisements for their products. The consumer will have to opt-out of every single one of these.
Companies have NOT shown in the past that they can be trusted wrt privacy; rather, they have shown quite the opposite (very large companies like Intel "consumer is the enemy", Sun "you have no privacy, get over it", and that other one have demonstrated they don't care about consumer privacy). Do you trust a company with your email address to not sell that information? Do you trust a company to delete your email address completely from their database? Do you trust companies not to 'exchange' information about consumers buying habits, etc etc?
Lastly, all the "usual" anti-spam arguments also apply, for example that most of the burden of cost is carried by the unwilling recipient of spam, typically through time and increased ISP costs.
Spam, all types of it, should be plain and simply illegal.
I am sure he's on AOL...
Even though spam can be anoying I would have been really worried if incompetent European politicians would try to regulate it (I have to know - I'm from Europe). Judging from what happend in the past (e.g. CompuServe blocking porn newsgroup sites because of Germany), they do more harm than good anyway.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I certainly doubt that this forms any
:-)
"pro-spam" regulation.
UCE is a form of advertising that is not legal
in Germany, which is part of the EU.
Maybe I am getting the details wrong:
Basically, if my competitor uses UCE for
advertising, I can have my lawyer send
him a letter asking to stop it, to send back
a written statement that they will stop using UCE
and are happy to pay me cash if they do it again.
Of course, THEY have to pay my lawyer.
Apart from this, there is a law regulating the
processing of person-related data. Most of the
time, they pretty much must have violated that
to get your email address. (The law does not
apply to persons doing this for private reasons)
So, you can still send spam if you are doing
it for private reasons. ("REPENT NOW!" or somesuch)
But then, this will constitute a violation of
the policy of your online provider - off you
go.
I have received spam from german companies
exactly twice. Both had their account revoked
at once, and had to pay the cost of the sysadmins
to do the cleanup. (Actually, they had to pay
the time the sysadmin needed to revoke their
account, too.) Both were not done via bulk-mailing
software, but were commited by newbie users
who did not know better.
I have never received spam from other countries within the EU - it's only you US folks who can't get your companies to behave