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Europe Passes Pro-spam Law

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the its-the-law dept.

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.)

3 of 95 comments (clear)

  1. Link to CAUCE by ewhac · · Score: 5
    The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email is one of the leading organizations fighting the battle to get spam off the Net. You may wish to give them your money. At the very least, you should give them some of your attention.

    Schwab

    --
    Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
  2. If you'd prefer that we not hit you in the face... by Booker · · Score: 5

    ... 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.

  3. The "opt-out" solution isn't a solution by BeanThere · · Score: 5

    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.