Inappropriate Spam Reaching Children?

peeweejd writes "Wired has an article stating that four out of five children receive inappropriate spam e-mail touting get-rich-quick schemes, and almost half receive spam linking to pornographic materials. Should spammers be held responsible for the spams they send out? Can someone sue a spammer for offering to sell 'adult only' items/services to children?" There are more details from survey originator Symantec's press release - and yes, Symantec does sell mail filtering software.

Looking for people interested in First Posts!

Are you one of those go getters?!

Re:Looking for people interested in First Posts!

But spambots will just strip off the .inv. Besides, I'm sure [e-mail] likes getting all the email I sign him up for.

Re:Looking for people interested in First Posts!

No, use @example.com

@localhost would be even better. If the address is invalid and the spammer is using particularly crappy mail software, you might get the bastard's machine stuck in a mail loop with itself...one less spammer disturbing the rest of us.

Should spammers be held responsible for the spams

Should spammers be held responsible for the spams they send out?

Yes.

Re:Should spammers be held responsible for the spa

And obviously so. We've got to start coming down hard on these people, setting some prominant examples.

Re:Should spammers be held responsible for the spa

I agree.

I mean really, if the corner gas station attendent was selling cigarettes, beer, or pornagraphy to underaged children, would he be held responsible? The obvious answer is yes, he would. So, why would we treat spammers any differently?

Re:Should spammers be held responsible for the spa

The problem being there is no way to tell how old the person who checks the email address is. An email address is just an alias, the person who checks that box could be 8 or 80, there is no way to tell. Unless there is some way to tell how old the person who checks the mailbox is, there is no way to hold people responsible for sending emails inappropriate for children to that mailbox. You can send porn to a physical mailbox, and the person who gets the mail may be a minor, but you can't be held responsible for that minor seeing "inappropriate" material.

They should e charged for sending spam (where applicable) but trying to prosecute them because they are sending mail to an emailbox where a child has access is very slippery, because there is no way to know who the box belongs to.

Re:Should spammers be held responsible for the spa

The problem being there is no way to tell how old the person who checks the email address is.

Well, sometimes it's hard to tell if the person across the counter is 17 (too young for cigarettes) or 18 (old enough for cigs but too young for pr0n & b33r), or 25 (old enough for all of them). That's why the law requires checking IDs before selling it.

I don't have any kids (yet), but if/when my kid gets explicit e-mail, you can bet I'm going to hunt down the dirtbag down. If a lawsuit doesn't work, maybe a baseball bat will...

Re:Should spammers be held responsible for the spa

> I don't see the problem in them [kids] seeing these materials

Maybe you don't have a problem with it, but I sure don't want MY kids thinking teenage girls F*ing a horse is OK. That is the picture that arrived in a spam this week.

Re:Should spammers be held responsible for the spa

I dunno. Might be one way to discourage little Brittany from getting that pony she's been wanting.

As a collector of pr0n, I'll trade you two "shaved curious cheerleaders", a "hidden shower cams" and a complete set of "World's largest gangbang" messages for that one. :)

Re:Should spammers be held responsible for the spa

"Maybe you don't have a problem with it, but I sure don't want MY kids thinking teenage girls F*ing a horse is OK"

Why would an email convince them its okay?

I gave my daughter an email account on hotmail last year (at age 11). I told her that she will get some email that is disgusting and perverted, and that she should just delete it. If she's puzzled or concerned, she can call me to look it over. And never talk to anyone unless you've met them in person first.

I'm sure she got the spam that you speak of (most of the internet did). It didn't twist her because she has the *foundation* to know right from wrong at age 12.

Its like when she asked to see the Matrix movie (she's in 7th grade), I said "well, it has some rough language". She said "Dad, kids talk that way all the time, I don't use that kind of language". Its just what I wanted to hear and I let her see it.

By age 12, kids really do understand right from wrong. Hell, 100 years ago, 12 and 13 year olds were already married, so the idea that children are fragile is a relatively recent thought (since WWII).

Anyway, if kids think that email confers a degree of acceptability of an action, then I suggest the child has more fundamental problems and probably shouldn't have an unsupervised email account to begin with.

Re:Should spammers be held responsible for the spa

Well, let me ask you this... in the long run, what's more harmful for the child, out of the following choices:

1. The child sees a sexual act in a spam message, and you, being the responsible, intelligent and loving parent you are, explain to them what they're seeing, and how it's morally right or wrong.

Or...

2. The government steps in and makes spam e-mail illegal because there's no viable solution for checking the age of an e-mail recipient before sending the message. Given how government generally operates, it should only be 3-5 years before snail-mail junk is outlawed also, leading to several hundreds (if not thousands) of lawsuits within a year. After that, probably another 2-3 years until someone comes up with the idea that since they don't approve of some e-mail or snail-mail they're getting, it's offensive and unwanted, therefore, must be spam... leading to more legislation defining the term "spam" and "unwanted commercial e-mail", eventually leading to the breakdown of even more of individual's basic human rights, especially Freedom of Speech, Press, and (although not specifically mentioned in the Constitution), Privacy. (My sig has particular relevance here.)

Granted, I'm not going to run aroun showing dirty pictures to kids, but in the grand scheme of things, there are only 2 groups of people that can do anything about it -- government, and IT. We're the IT, so let's try to come up with a solution before the government starts.

Re:Should spammers be held responsible for the spa

Everyone here familiar with the federal 'Do Not Call' list for telemarketers? Wouldn't it be possible to create a similar product for the web? A 'Do Not Spam' list? Anyone sending say... 100 emails a day would have to cross-reference the recipients addresses with those on the list. And just maybe to support the thing... pay a dollar per account to get your name added... maybe... If you care enough about your kids to keep them from seeing pr0n, pay the buck, if not, don't pay the dollar. Kinda like a mixture of the preposed Public Domain Enhancement Act [eldred.cc] and the federal 'Do Not Call' list.

Re:Should spammers be held responsible for the spa

Are you suggesting that U.K. spammers should be beaten with a baseball bat if they send explicit material to an 18 year old in the USA, despite it being perfectly reasonable material for somebody of that age in their own country?

Well, at 18, not a baseball bat so much. I think they should be legally culpable for breaking the laws of the US, just as someone in the US should be culpable for advertizing Nazi memorabilia across the internet to someone in France (if I remember my google / ebay precedents right). [BTB, I agree with American policy there: it may be bad to sell Nazi memorabilia, but I don't think it's the government's call.]

I'm sure that in some countries, people would suggest that USA porno merchants be beaten with a baseball bat for daring to show women naked to anybody of any age. Should this also be carried out?

Very good question, actually. I started by thinking, "Well, anyone who sends that stuff to a seven-year-old is really fsck'd in the head. They're seriously morally reprehensible and such behavior shouldn't be tolerated." I think in our culture, most people would agree with me.

But pornography for adults is reprehensible and depraved as well -- not to the same degree, but it is. Why should I tolerate one, and not the other?

Especially since pr0n spammers aren't content to sit and wait for people to come to them, but actively seek out people, who may be trying to avoid it. Porn addiction is a real thing; there are many men who struggle with it, who want to quit, but can't. I've never been much tempted in that way, but I've had friends who are. Many pornographers know this: that's why they spam and put out teasers, because they know the bait works.

It'd be like a drug dealer, not willing to simply let people come to him, sending out "free samples" of heroin or coke in the mail, that when you opened it automatically injected you with something. It's preying on the weak-willed, just like casinos, and even credit-card companies (Are you paying off your bill every month? Let's raise your limit, so you're tempted to spend 'till you can't! I have like a $13,000 limit on one of my cards due to this effect.)

Or perhaps more apropos, like a liqour company sending out airline-size samples of their warez to random people, not caring, probably even knowing that some of the recipients were recovering alcoholics.

But getting back to your question: I live in a culture that takes a laissez-faire attitudes towards adults. If you want to pollute your body & your mind, we'll let you do so; it's your responsibility (once you're old enough), not ours. One advantage of that kind of a society is that when you do reject that crap, it actually means something: you're doing it because you want to, not because you must. And I think that makes the choice more valuable.

So no, I don't intend to attack the pr0n industry with baseball bats. Still, if you send pr0n to someone in Saudi Arabia, you should be legally culpable. =)

Re:Should spammers be held responsible for the spa

Bullshit. If you can't be sure that you aren't sending obscene materials to minors, then you have no business doing so. The crudeness of the internet is no excuse to ignore corporeal sensibilities.

If some other adult gave you some indication that it was acceptable to send such materials to a particular destination, that's another issue entirely. You would not be acting with reckless disregard of the foreseeable consequences of your actions.

This isn't just about legally obscene materials. Business proprietors should have a legal incentive to not act like total morons.

Re:Should spammers be held responsible for the spa

Unless there is some way to tell how old the person who checks the mailbox is, there is no way to hold people responsible for sending emails inappropriate for children to that mailbox. You can send porn to a physical mailbox, and the person who gets the mail may be a minor, but you can't be held responsible for that minor seeing "inappropriate" material.

Unless there is some way to tell how old the person who walks by is, there is no way to hold people responsible for posting pornographic billboards inappropriate for children on that street.

I'm sorry, but I just don't see your argument. 'Broadcasting' is no excuse for exposing children to this stuff. It's not acceptable out in public, nor on TV (unless you subscribe to something, in which case the control is on your side), so it sure as hell shouldn't be allowed on the Internet.

Why they keep porno mags behind the counter

Blocking the dirty spam is along the same lines as why video stores put the porn in a back room and why gas stations keep the porno mags behind the counter. Its inappropriate material that has laws concerning the age of the person who views it, and therefore MUST be treated differently.

Since the stores don't know the age of their potential customers, they have to keep those adult things seperated. Same goes for spam.

If I went to the post office and got 10,000 post card stamps and then printed a picture of some boobs on there, and mailed the cards out to 10k random people, I bet I would get my ass sued by at least 100 of them. Why can't the same thing happen to spammers?

They don't break down the age groups

From the underlying study:
The survey, conducted online for Symantec by Applied Research, a
full service market research firm, interviewed 1,000 youths
between the ages of seven and 18.

I wish they disclosed the breakdown of ages. There is a vast
difference in seventeen year old reading e-mail without their
parents and seven year olds.

I would like to know how many of the children in this study were
12 or under.

When asked how often they check emails, 72 percent of the
respondents said a few times a week to a few times a day. When
asked how important it is to always have mom or dad check emails
with them, nearly one in three said it is not important, 21
percent said they don't care and 16 percent said they don't want
their parents to check their emails with them. Furthermore, when
asked whether they get parents' permission before giving out
their personal email addresses to friends or even people and Web
sites with which they are not familiar, 46 percent of the youths
responded that they do not..

Again, this is highly dependant on the ages of the children.
Younger children would be more likely to ask their parents to
help them get their e-mail, while teenagers would be far more
likely to want their parents to just leave them alone.

It's difficult to infer anything meaningful from these numbers.

Indeed.

half of the kids surveyed reported feeling uncomfortable and offended when seeing improper email content...

...interviewed 1,000 youths between the ages of seven and 18.

Any teenagers in that half were so, so lying.

ah, humor

But in all seriousness, it was my experience while volunteering in a MS tech support chatroom (back when comic chat was sorta popular) there ARE teenage boys who don't want to see that shit. I've even had people drop in the room to ask where they could contact a trustworthy adult to report someone who had sent them something either via file xfer or url.

Something does need to be done, but I don't see how any of it can be fixed without changing the basic infrastructure of email communications.

Re:They don't break down the age groups

I wish they disclosed the breakdown of ages. There is a vast difference in seventeen year old reading e-mail without their parents and seven year olds.

My seven year old reads email on her own. Any email she receives that is not coming from someone on a whitelist that I maintain goes into a mailbox under her mother's account (this is after spam filtering, of course).

Her mom will drop it into her inbox or whatever when it's appropriate, and let her know that she got this mail, and usually ask me to add it to her whitelist.

(sorry for the confusing pronouns, this would be easier to explain if I had a boy).

Simple.

What is their to think about? Yes. If you are offering porn to my (or anyone's) children, you should held liable by either your or my state law.

Re:Simple.

Why? Why is it bad? Why is it criminal?

Why is offering porn to minors criminal? You need this explained? Imagine an old man standing outside a candy store, offering graphic pornography to small children. If that doesn't make you queasy, you're a sociopath.

pictures of naked people is required for minors via public education.

"Education", indeed. Keep in mind, nudity != pornography.

Re:Simple.

Sure it makes me queasy, but so would an old man offering anything to only small children outside a candy store. But that's not the case here. There's no malicious intent here. There's no targetting here (though there might be, more likely it's just a spamlist).

Furthermore, the reason that would make me queasy isn't because it's pornography, but because it's predatory.

Re:Simple.

There's no malicious intent here. There's no targetting here...

That would make it negligence, which is not as bad as the outright intent to send spam to children but it still should be illegal.

Let's change up the "old man outside a candystore" scenario with something more plausible: a vending machine outside a candystore. It's illegal to stock it with booze regardless of the intent, because you can't ensure that underage people won't have access.

Re:Simple.

Pornography is what we don't want innocent seven year old children looking at.

Utterly useless definition. Given a photograph, how do you determine if it's pornographic or not? Would another person determine differently? You offer a variant of the usual "I'll know it when I see it" criterion, which is not sufficiently well defined to use in a legal setting.

OK, this is where I think the whole of western society (and perhaps the United States most particularly) is sick and weird and different only in degree from the Taliban. We have a very sick, weird attitude to sexuality, and it underlies most of our social problems.

Sexual behaviour is normal behaviour. If it wasn't normal behaviour, we wouldn't exist as a species. Kids learn appropriate behaviour by observation. But western kids never learn appropriate sexual behaviour, because they're never allowed to see it. On the contrary, when they are exposed to images of implied sexuality it's very often in the context of action films where the sexuality is either co-ercive or manipulative.

If the argument was that children ought not to be exposed to images of sexual coercion or sexual violence then I would see the sense in that. If the argument was that children ought to be exposed to images of homosexuality only in the context of images of heterosexuality I would see the argument. If the argument was that children ought to see sexual behaviour only in the presence of a responsible adult who could explain what's going on that would seem sensible.

But childern can't learn appropriate sexual behaviour unless they can see appropriate sexual behaviour. Cutting children off from observing appropriate sexual behaviour between adults is how we breed our amazing zoo of sexual inadequacies and, in particular, our rapists. We'd live in a much healthier society if we didn't keep sexuality hidden from children.

Re:Simple.

It's called strict liability.

It doesn't matter that you didn't know that girl was only 15, you're going to jail for statutory rape. (You may have an out if she *said* she was 19, but that's acting in good faith, not ignorance).

It doesn't matter that you didn't know "soccrkid95" was only 8, you're going to jail for child abuse through exposure to images.

If you want to avoid going to jail, check ID. In other words...Opt-IN.

It's just *snapping fingers* that easy

Re:Simple.

Agreed 110%. Parents shouldn't be dropping their kids off at a strip club any more than they should be leaving them alone while on the Internet. If they can't handle that, they should get snipped/tied.

Re:Simple.

The problem here is distinction.

The internet is silmutaniously the worlds largest strip club and the worlds largest library/school/university all rolled into one.

Hmm... after typing that, I just realized what educators could do differently to raise my grades...

Anyway... You made the point that parent's shouldn't be dropping their kids off at strip clubs. The problem is, when the strip club is the school, that means you should no longer drop your kids off at school, either... if that makes sense...

Re:Simple.

If your child is too young to be viewing pornographic material and you provide them with their own unsupervised e-mail address, you should be held liable by state law.

Email is not a broadcast medium. What you are saying amounts to holding the parents of children specifically targetted with pornography responsible for fighting it off. If you are selling age-restricted materials, it is up to you to make effort to insure that those materials are not purposefully sent to a minor. This is the law with all age-restricted materials. You don't have any children, obviously, but if you did, are you aware that they would have a physical address? Should alchohol, tobacco, and pornography companies send their products to your (theoretical) minor child? Get your head out of your ass.

Re:Simple.

Email is not a broadcast medium, regardless of the attempts of SPAMMERS and their lackeys (such as yourself) to change this. If you could get arrested for snail mailing it to someone, there's no good reason NOT to arrest you for emailing it to someone.

Personally, I'd love to HAVE YOU ARRESTED for sending me bulk mail & corporeal spam of any kind.

Re:Simple.

If your child is too young to be viewing pornographic material and you provide them with their own unsupervised e-mail address, you should be held liable by state law.

Right. And if a 747 crashes into my house, the airline should sue me for building on THEIR flight path.

Bred to be a stud

Just imagine if you had started enlarging your penis at age 6.

whats worse

What's worse is those HTML emails that have porn already in them, with misleading subjects. So the even the kids that know to delete them but use the preview pane in Outlook will see it.

Should be illegal.

uhmm

I don't think you've seen a lot of the porn out there.

"Mommy, what's that lady doing to that horsie?"

We aren't talking about playboy and cheesecake here. Some of it is wildly inappropriate stuff.

Re:uhmm

Very young children shouldn't be reading email unsupervised. Period.

Flame on AC, I shall not respond.

Re:uhmm

remember the first naughty film/book/magazine you saw? You weren't 18, were you?

No but it wasn't some random email either. Usually kids first get a look at explicit material through their own curiosity and effort, or because one of their peers introduced it. It doesn't just show up at their doorstep, regardless of their maturity or interest.

Also, a lot of the stuff in emails is much more explicit than has been typically available in print - we aren't talking Playboy nudity or even Hustler here. It's really nasty disturning stuff, that requires some emotional maturity to handle.

This issue of kids seeking out sexually explicit material on their own interest is different from adults using deception to send it to kids.

Oh, and part of the process of being exposed to sexually explicit material as a kid usually involved being caught by your parents and having to deal with that.

Re:uhmm

And thus learning that sexuality entails shame. A lesson I'd rather my kids skipped.

Re:whats worse

Oh my god!!!! Junior saw a tit, he is sure to grow up being a serial killer/rapist/laywer/president

Human sexuality is shaped at an early age. Things that junior commonly sees with sex can, and often do, become neccessary associations. Kinks, if you will.

It's not at all far-fetched that irreparable harm is being done by exposing kids to a thousand adverts for Barnyard Antics, bondage fetish sites, so on and so on. And if the parent's not around and junior picks one of these as the first site to spend a little time doing his first-ever exploring, it will leave a long-term impression.

Re:whats worse

name one thing worse than porn

Riaa.com