Porn website spammers highlight legal hypocrisy

Nothing so thoroughly points out the hypocrisy of attitude by lawmakers towards unsolicited commercial e-mail (otherwise known as spam) as the endless proliferation of unsolicited e-mail for pornographic websites.

Perhaps this is not the headache for you that it is for me (and by that, I do not imply that perhaps you enjoy receiving it, while I do not).

Irish internet service providers (ISPs) have not received the same Niagara of spam that curses US ISPs, although it is certainly a serious and costly problem for them.

So, if your only e-mail account is through an Irish ISP and you don't post e-mail messages to online discussion boards, your email address probably hasn't been harvested (yet) by spammers.

However, if you use a free Web-based e-mail service such as Hotmail, you probably receive a daily regurgitation of the vile stuff - much of it pornographic.

Hotmail, which is owned by Microsoft, has been particularly vulnerable to spam attacks for reasons that seem to reside with the company's poor screening and blocking of it.

Hotmail actually has an excellent feature that allows a subscriber to automatically reroute bulk e-mails into a separate folder (spam is typically sent out to millions of e-mail addresses at the same time).

But unfortunately, it only seems to snag about half my daily average of 20 pieces of spam, of which about one-fifth is for porn (well, one-quarter, if you count all those robustly phrased ads for Viagra supplies online).

The real issue is why anyone should be subjected to this garbage at all.

Spam is not just an annoyance but causes very serious problems for network operators, ISPs and company networks. Those massive mailings can (at the very least) cause networks to operate sluggishly and (at worst) can bring down even the largest networks.

ISPs and many large corporations employ full-time staff for the sole purpose of filtering out as much spam as possible before it actually finds its way to their users.

Taking into account the delays, system failures, virus issues and other problems unleashed by spam, a recent EU study has estimated that unsolicited commercial e-mail costs internet users worldwide an incredible #10 billion (£7.9 billion) per year.

Despite this, only feeble attempts have been made by global legislators to stop it. While privacy protections in the EU should help prevent the capturing of e-mail addresses and unsolicited sending of spam, in reality they do almost nothing of the sort and EU states have been reluctant to pursue spammers through the courts.

In contrast, individual cases have been taken successfully against some spammers in the US, but cut one down and 10 more spring up to take the cretin's place.

There are now some state laws prohibiting spam in the US - last month, the Washington State Supreme Court upheld its spam law after a challenge to it - but, to the frustration of thousands of campaigners, there is still no federal law. Why not?

The reason is connected to the US laissez-faire approach to business - regulate it as little as possible, which is often a good approach, but not in the case of spam.

Businesses have been allowed to view the electronic information-gathering capabilities of the Net as the greatest boon to harvesting personal information for direct marketing.

This stance has caused conflict between the EU and the US, as the EU has far stricter protections against the gathering and use of personal information. And increasingly, it is also causing conflict between the business world and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the federal body charged with regulating (at least in some measure) the way in which businesses conduct their trade.

Even the Bush administration FTC is becoming concerned about privacy issues.

More importantly, internet privacy is ranked as the top issue for consumers, who cite their worries about how companies will use their information as the number one reason they do not buy goods on the Net.

Despite this, companies continue to insist they can self-regulate against abuses. So far, they have given almost no indication that they can, as study after study, including some by the FTC, demonstrates they do pretty much whatever they want unless caught.

Now, let's set against this the attitude of most world governments towards pornography and, in particular, the approach of the US government.

More than once, the US has tried to bring in laws that would restrict the availability of sexually explicit content on the Web. It has tried to require sites to block underage Net users from accessing sites with such content and require public facilities, such as libraries, to filter content just in case a child should stumble on a porn site.

I'm not concerned here with the issues surrounding those acts of attempted censorship or whether anyone thinks they were good or bad approaches. I just want to point out that the single most likely place that most US children will encounter a link to a site containing porn - and sometimes, the most shockingly explicit porn - is the family AOL or Hotmail account.

I believe it is appalling that this is the case. However, I have yet to hear any of the anti-porn contingent go after spammers, and the US government has never publicly acknowledged that pornographic spam arriving into individuals' e-mail accounts is a worry for children. Yet even regular mail is strictly controlled in this area - adult content mail must be marked as such.

One US politician, Ms Zoe Lofgren of Silicon Valley, is proposing a federal bill that would require porn spam to be labelled with some kind of technical identifier, which would make it screenable. Another politician, Pennsylvania's Ms Melissa Hart, also proposed a law that would place particular controls on pornographic spam, as well as other forms of spam. But Ms Lofgren believes it is "too restrictive" because of other elements in the bill to lift the burden of controlling spam from the recipients to the direct marketers.

And that's the crux of the matter - most lawmakers would prefer to keep spam as a "right" for business, requiring individuals to trust that spammers will let them opt out of receiving such junk, rather than requiring mass e-mailers to get permission from recipients before they send their advertising.

Ms Lofgren's bill preserves that view - pornographic spam should just be labelled as such so that it can be filtered out by those who object to it, rather than requiring the porn merchants to get permission to send it in the first place.

What a bunch of hypocritical nonsense. An opt-in approach clearly resolves the spamming issue, rather than complicating it. One hopes lawmakers here and in the EU - and eventually the US - will codify such an approach into international laws.

klillington@irish-times.ie