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October 25, 2005
Update: Michigan's Email Child Protection Law
The Detroit Free Press published a great article about the outrage of some Michigan citizens over the apparant failure of Michigan's email child protection law.
It appears that many citizens and lawmakers are surprised to find that children on the Do-Not-Email list are still getting porn and other inappropriate messages.
I myself am surprised as well.
Generally, I think of porn spammers as being among the most law-abiding folks in the country. Think about it, if you can make $50,000 a year in profit sending unsolicited email campaigns for porn sites, why wouldn't you want to spend $75,000 a year to pay Michigan and Utah--the other state enacting a new email child protection law--to scrub your lists?
In all seriousness, I have young children, and the problem Michigan and Utah are trying to address is very real and very important. However, new laws don't stop people who are already criminals, especially if the states haven't budgeted substantial resources to enforce them. And, the biggest irony of all is that these laws will do nothing more than put a large tax on legitimate marketers who are afraid their products might fall under these states guidelines. In the end, I fear these laws will do nothing more than send a signal to businesses that were never intended to be covered by these laws that these states would prefer you to do business somewhere else.
Posted by Bill Nussey at October 25, 2005 11:08 AM
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Comments
The goals of the project are laudable, but the approach has been open to obvious abuse. Thankfully the FCC has recently communicated the problems with the law and this should stop the spread of the legislation http://www.clickz.com/news/article.php/3561261
So is there any solution to porn spam into children's accounts - thinking about it as I type this tonight I think in general the best approach I can come up with seems to be a custom spam filter and "triple" opt-in mechanism for designated childrens accounts. This is best implemented for younger children (under 14). A Yahoo or Hotmail email account can be marked by the user as a child's account. Then a third part email address (the parent's) would get carbon copied whenever that child's email address is sent to - and the parent can mark the emails that should be released from the "sandbox" into the child account's inbox. If a parent marks a sender as kosher then emails from that particular sender can be read immediately in the childs account without being sandboxed.
This type of oversight for independently minded teenagers is probably not going to fly but for the youngest children out there unintential viewing of these porn emails is avoided. This still doesnt keep kids who want to see this content from seeing it, but porn spam would be controllable with this sort of "parent trustee" and designated child account setup.
Or I have no idea what I'm talking about :-)
Posted by: Raghu at November 3, 2005 08:10 PM
Bill:
I don't think operations outside of the US care a whit about state laws that don't affect them in any way.
Why should they?
If the Chinese said you could not mail commercial email into China without jumping thru hoops and paying a fee for a scrubbing list that is not ready or up to date. And you are not even trying to market to China in the first place. (Children down normally have credit cards)Would you bother to try and scrub your corporate mailing lists to see if there was inadventenly a Chinese address on it.
I wouldn't!
Regards,
Charles Read
Posted by: Charles Read at November 8, 2005 02:14 PM