-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- I have not heard Rotenberg's statements on private collection of public data and spam, but I can make my own. At 10:13 PM 5/30/97 -0700, Tim May wrote:
The latest quote is from Marc Rotenberg, on a CNN piece on spam and anti-spam legislation, saying that what the legislators in Congress really need to look into is how the spammers develop their data bases..... ... Incredible. Does he propose investigations of private data gathering?
I'd agree here. Rather than have Congress blindly pass a law, some investigation of the matter should be done first. While I am not supporting a law, any such law should have three parts: a) Codification b) Rulemaking c) Further Investigation Codification is actual law, and takes a lot of agreement and about two years to change. Rules are created by an agency and take about 120 to change. Investigation allows the clueless and unknowing to study the impact of the law and whether or not the law, and less or stronger provisions are appropriate. Take one simple provision as an example, tagging of commercial spam. One less enlightened bill proposes that the subject line always begin with the word "Advertisement". A better solution would be to a) codify the principle, not the method. "All spam must be tagged." b) Allow rules to be created that describe the tagging process (for example an X-header or subject line. The use of "Ad:" instead of the full word) c) Allow the agency involved to perform a study to see if the rulemaking worked, if not then change the rule. As for investigations into data gathering, I've been doing that for some time. It has educated me, and would no doubt educate congress. Two years ago, I spoke with the president of Pro-CD, a popular CD-phonebook company. I asked him why unlisted numbers are not on the CD's, and why so few fax numbers are on the CD's. This information is readily available. He said that only previous published collections are republished by him. What spammers are doing is invasive in that they are collecting the information for the first time.
I may not "like" it, but their behavior is as legal as someone calling me on the phone.
I'll agree with you to some degree. After all, it *IS* ILLEGAL for someone to call you on the phone for the equivalent of spam, many people would like email spam to be just as illegal. However there are loopholes in the law that allow email to be sent under the same circumstances. State laws, and the federal law have provisions such as time ranges calls can be made (daytime hours only), prohibitions on the use of automated equipment, removal lists, and call destinations absolutely prohibited (hospitals, emergency numbers). For good or for bad, the current movement in lawmaking is to plug these loopholes that exist for email.
Look, I'm annoyed by getting 5-10 "unwanted" spam messages a day.
Then you miss the point. For all practical purposes, the spam industry does not exist in the US. There are one or two, perhaps a dozen companies doing this as a full time endevour. We are not close to spam companies matching the number of radio stations, or even newspapers. We do not even envision the concept of the number of spammers equaling the number of lawyers. The current spam bills are meant to address the actions of about five people in the entire United States. Pick up any metropolitan newspaper. Count the number of classified ads on any given day. Spam is cheaper and reaches more people. Would you like to see this number of spams in you mail box? Will you honestly say that 500-1000 spams in your mailbox is simply annoying? Multiply this by the number of newspapers in the US. The manner in which the information is collected is invasive. People feel their privacy is being violated. The right to be left alone is a fundamental right. While some spammers may feel they have a right to speak, they have no right to be heard. They do not have a right to force me to listen. The cost shifting problem also needs to be addressed. Current spam bills are based on CONTENT of the spam message. Another way to address the problem is to look at the data collection issue. A third method is to address the headers. Data collection is currently being done on an opt-out basis. Opt-in is thought by many to be preferable. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 5.0 beta Charset: noconv iQBVAwUBM5Axa0GpGhRXg5NZAQEJEgIAoKPhLODYtbmqrSTZ2bUd43gKvpt1XLxs TwzpRAb/yZWvmeurXpJ9YAKjFfGxvpkxQ6iX1ButM1NcrULYnmVSdw== =RSAd -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- Robert Costner Phone: (770) 512-8746 Electronic Frontiers Georgia mailto:pooh@efga.org http://www.efga.org/ run PGP 5.0 for my public key