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Microsoft find spam bill hard to swallow Date: 8/22/2005 |
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The US executive charged with leading Microsoft's global drive against spam and phishing frauds paid a flying visit to Wellington last week to try to talk the Government out of passing its proposed anti-spam bill in its current form. Microsoft's Technology Care and Safety Group, headed by Ryan Hamlin, is celebrating a blow against spam in the US after securing a $US7 million settlement from former spammer Scott Richter, who Mr Hamlin describes as the third largest spammer in the US, responsible for sending out more than 20 billion spam messages in just one year. However, he says the New Zealand Government's Unsolicited Electronic Messages Bill is "too broad" and could impinge on "the amazing vehicle of e-mail marketing". Mr Hamlin says Microsoft would like to see the bill changed so that businesses could be confident they could continue to use databases that they had already compiled to send out e-mail. He also wants definitions in the bill changed so that companies would be able to e-mail information about new products and services to customers, even if they had opted out of receiving e-mail about other services they had bought from the company in the past. Though often criticised as too meek, US anti-spam legislation ? which relies on people opting out of spam ? has proved effective in supporting prosecutions and deterring spammers, he says. Mr Hamlin's critique came as it emerged that the Government has significantly tightened its anti-spam bill, tabled in parliament late last month. Businesses would fall foul of the law by sending out just a single unsolicited e-mail unless they could reasonably infer the recipient's consent to receive it. Cabinet decided in February to only define senders of e-mail as spammers if they sent "multiple" unsolicited e-mails, overturning a recommendation from Communications Minister David Cunliffe. He favoured following Australian legislation and treating unsolicited e-mails as spam regardless of how many messages were sent by a spammer. Mr Cunliffe ultimately got his way when the bill was published last month. He says the Parliamentary Counsel Office, which is responsible for drafting legislation, advised there were legal complexities in defining an appropriate threshold for multiple spam messages and that Cabinet's preferred approach would have been hard to nail down. "The recommendation that the lawyers came forward with in the end was allowing an individual message to be classified as spam." However, in practice, the Internal Affairs Department, which will be charged with enforcing the anti-spam law, would be unlikely to pursue someone for sending out a single unsolicited message, he says. Mr Hamlin says his understanding is that there are just three big spammers operating in New Zealand, responsible for producing about 5 per cent of the spam that arrives in New Zealanders' inboxes. Microsoft is keen to stamp out spam, but Mr Hamlin is concerned the bill as it stands could prevent businesses from sending out e-mails to people who had been their customers. He says businesses ought to be able to send unsolicited e-mail to people even if they are unsure if they have a pre-existing business relationship with them. This is so long as they label their e-mail as advertising, for example by inserting the code "ADV" at the start of the subject line, or "participate in an approved self-regulatory programme based on e-mail best practices". Businesses should only be obliged to stop sending such messages if people "opted out" of receiving further e-mails, he says. Labelling would have the advantage that customers who did not want to receive advertising could easily filter out unwanted messages. Mr Cunliffe says Microsoft's proposed "opt out" approach is too weak and has been rejected. "We decided it's going to be opt-in. End of story. Why should you have to opt out of spam?" THE anti-spam bill stipulates that the public should complain about spam e-mails to their ISP first, which could then refer the matter to the Internal Affairs Department for investigation. Non-profit Internet society InternetNZ has objected, saying this will place an administrative burden on ISPs and that people should be able to complain directly to Internal Affairs about spam. Mr Cunliffe says the best approach to enforcement could be revisited when the bill goes before a select committee. However, he argues the arrangement proposed in the bill will add to the incentives for ISPs to deploy the best filtering tools they can find in order to minimise the amount of spam that customers receive. Mr Hamlin says the financial returns that are reaped by spammers worldwide are dwindling thanks to anti-spam legislation overseas, filtering tools and a more savvy public. "We can see the light at the end of the tunnel. The number of new spammers getting into the game is dropping down to nothing and the `good' spammers are moving on to other activities such as phishing and ID theft. This is both good and bad news." US magazine Information Week last week reported that there are signs spam is "nowhere near the problem it was a few years ago", in part because of filtering technology. It cited a poll by America Online which said complaints from customers had dropped 85 per cent in two years and that the number of spam messages received by AOL had dropped by half to about a billion a day over the same period. |
| Source: Stuff.co.nz |
