- Protection steps
So what can parents do? In a recent phone interview,
FTC staff attorney Brian Huseman (referred to by his colleagues as the
Commission's "spam czar") rattled off several steps right away:
- Learn how to filter your email. Many people
aren't aware that the filters in their Outlook or Eudora email software
or provided by their Internet service providers aren't turned on, Brian
told us. Here are PrivacyToolbox.org's
tutorials for Outlook
and Eudora.
- Don't (or don't let your children) make your
email address public - e.g., in online chat, on Web discussion boards,
or on Internet newsgroups...
- OR get a "disposable email address" at a service
like SpamGourmet.com and use
this address in public places (you can simply shut an address down if
it starts receiving spam, and this won't affect your permanent address).
- Have two or more "real" email addresses - one
public (like a free Hotmail or Yahoo account which will get all the
spam and which you or the kids can give out freely), and one just for
personal correspondence.
For details, here's the FTC's
"You've Got Spam" page. Another great resource is the Internet Education
Foundation's new PrivacyToolbox.org (still in beta testing, so they ask
us to be patient with pieces still under construction). Here's the Toolbox's
spam page.
Setting up some of these spam-reduction options
would be great for parents and kids to do together. As you well know,
children can usually help parents through the process, which can have
good effects on things like children's self-esteem, mutual parent-child
respect, and family communications.
- Reporting
A subscriber recently forwarded us a particularly
offensive piece of porn spam, saying it "must be illegal content" but
she didn't know who the appropriate authorities were to alert, which was
why she was emailing us. We had to tell her that, unfortunately, the email
isn't illegal (yet, anyway, until/unless some long-pending spam legislation
finishes its journey through Congress), because it made no reference to
children and didn't appear to be targeting underage recipients. But we
did send her some information, realizing it was time to share it with
all of you. [BTW, child pornography is illegal in the US and should
be reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children's
CyberTipline.com. But don't
download or copy Web pages - only report URLs/Web addresses. Downloading
or making a copy of child pornography, even as evidence, is a crime in
the US (see GetNetWise.org).]
For reporting nasty email, the Federal Trade Commission
is the closest thing the US has to a spam cop (see below for other resources
- although it's really looking for spam representing deceptive and fraudulent
commercial practices, not the kind our subscriber forwarded to us. The
Commission receives more than 40,000 spam-related complaints a day via
uce@ftc.gov ("uce" for unsolicited commercial
email) or through its site's "Complaint
Form". The complaints go into a huge database that the FTC uses to
detect trends (e.g., multiple complaints about a particular source the
Commission should sue), to amass evidence for a case, or to forward to
other government agencies for action (the Justice Department has begun
to take an interest in porn spam related to kids).
So the FTC is also a clearinghouse, a good first
line of defense. "We definitely want consumers to send spam to us. We
share it with other agencies, and we work with various states who have
state spam laws," Brian told us. PrivacyToolbox.org has specific
instructions on how to report spam.
- Here are some other anti-spam resources:
- SpamCop complements
the FTC's uce@ftc.gov complaint service
by passing complaints directly on to Internet service providers. "Since
many ISPs prohibit pornography and mass mailing emails," Privacy
Toolbox explains, your complaint can help get the offending spammer's
Internet access cut off.
- One techie journalist's favorite - "the holy
grail of spam filters," no less - is SpamNet, which works with Microsoft
Outlook email software. Here's the review at ZDNet,
and here's his readers'
responses on SpamNet and other products and technologies in a later
article.
- A New
York Times article on spam
- The Wired
News piece mentioned above links to a map an anti-spam activist
has worked up, showing how our email addresses are harvested and move
around among spammers' databases, then get sold to legitimate companies.
- Spam.Abuse.net
has a fund of anti-spam resource links, including the latest spam news.
- CAUCE, the
Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email, provides an international
perspective on spam.
- The
Privacy Toolbox, as mentioned above - still in beta, but really
helpful (with little flash tutorials to boot).
- An article that takes you inside the Nigerian
spam scam that has been circulating around the Net for years, "Meet
the Nigerian E-Mail Grifters".
- Students & 'Net thinking'
"Net thinking" might be described as the way students
with Net access approach being a student. It's "a form of reasoning that
characterizes many students who are growing up with the Internet as their
primary, and in some cases, sole source of research," says the Washington
Post.
According to the Post, the good news is Net thinkers
"generate work quickly and make connections easily" - they can marshal
facts, detect trends, and come up with original ideas because of the access
the Net gives them to information, worldwide (one professor quoted says
his "best undergraduates come up with new takes on old subjects as quickly
as graduate students did years ago" partly because of this access). The
bad news is they "value information-gathering over deliberation, breadth
over depth, and other people's arguments over their own." You might say
there are good Net thinkers (those who want to think) and not-so-good
ones.
The need, this article suggests, is to move students
into "post-Net thinking," which some educators are seeing in some of their
students: "a realization that digital is not enough, that grazing is good,
but great ideas require deep reading, incubation, and contemplation."
The Post talked to one educator who believes this is where today's students
are headed if "grown-ups take seriously their assigning, as well
as advising, role." This is a useful article for any parent or educator
who wants to help students use the Web intelligently - as a tool for developing
critical thinking as well as for research.
- Saudi Net filtering
For a study on Saudi government filtering of its
citizens' Net access, Harvard Law School researchers found that 2,038
of the 60,000 Web pages they tried to access blocked. The blocked pages
"contained information about religion, health, education, reference, humor,
and entertainment" and were in Web sites that are "popular elsewhere in
the world," according to the
study's abstract. Among the researchers' conclusions: "that the Saudi
government maintains an active interest in filtering non-sexually explicit
Web content for users within the Kingdom" and "that substantial amounts
of non-sexually explicit Web content is in fact effectively inaccessible
to most Saudi Arabian." The report explains that anyone in Saudi Arabia
can have Net access through local Internet service providers, but all
ISPs' Web traffic goes through a group of government-controlled proxy
servers, and these are where the filtering occurs. For the study, its
authors accessed the Net through those Saudi proxy servers. Here's Wired
News's coverage of the Harvard study, pointing out different countries'
approaches to censorship. For example, Saudi filtering concerns personal
morality, while Chinese government fears of political subversion spell
filtering of news sites. Our thanks to BNA
Internet Law for pointing this study out.
- The why of Whyville's popularity
Its popularity is very high (especially among
11-to-13-year-old girls), to the tune of 225,000 registered users. Whyville.net,
reports the Los
Angeles Times, is an "edutainment" site designed to teach 'tweens
science by making it fun. Experts aren't sure how much of the site is
entertainment and how much is education, but its sheer popularity (the
site's staff later told us it gets 800-1,000 new users a day) has made
the US National Science Foundation - which has a similar goal of wanting
to get kids engaged in the sciences - is actually researching just that
question. But one of the site's biggest investors is already convinced
that science is being taught in Whyville: "James N. Bower, a bearded,
pony-tailed former Caltech neurobiologist [and pioneer in computational
biology now at the University of Texas] who is the guiding force and one
of the biggest investors in Numedeon [creators of the site], said he is
convinced that Whyville's informal, indirect approach to education is
effective," reports the L.A. Times. Our thanks to longtime subscriber,
mom, and Whyville fan Susan in California for pointing this site out.
- Hate site: Intentionally confusing
Right-wing extremists are trying to use the anti-globalization
movement to recruit new hate activists. According to Wired
News, the Anti-Defamation League has gone on the offensive against
a site of the [right-wing] "Anti-Globalism Action Network" (g8activist.com),
which could easily be accessed by mistake by those intending to visit
the G8 Activist Network (g8activist.ca)." The right-wing site links to
a group called the National Alliance, which the Web site describes as
a "controversial White Nationalist organization." Users should be aware
of a clear distinction between "globalism," an anti-semitic term used
by right-wing extremists to refer to a "Zionist world government," and
"globalization" used, of course, by the anti-globalization movement.
- Filtering company's graphic marketing
To show how "effective" its filtering is, Websense
employs a controversial tactic: From its home page, the company links
to X-rated, hate, and other Web sites that it says its competitors fail
to block. According to MSNBC,
Websense's site "features disclaimers similar to those found on adult
Web sites that ask viewers to click on a button to verify that they are
at least 18 and are prepared to view 'sexually explicit or other material
which you may find offensive'." Our thanks to QuickLinks
for pointing this item out.
- UK Net users' privacy risk
Because of some laws passed in 2000, starting
next month UK Internet service providers will be legally obligated to
monitor their customers' online activities. According to the BBC,
"the information gathered about what people look at on the Web, the content
of email messages and their phone conversations will be passed to the
police or a government monitoring station." It's the new Regulation of
Investigatory Powers Act that calls for the installation of surveillance
technology at large communications companies. It covers fax and phone
communications as well as the Internet and will affect about one in 10,000
of their customers.
- Net: UK way of life
Meanwhile, even as the Internet potentially becomes
a privacy risk, it has also "become a way of life for most Britons," the
BBC
reports. Citing a survey by Which? consumer magazine, the BBC says
over 70% of Britons find the Internet essential. They spend an average
of seven hours a week online (9% use the Net more than 20 hours/week),
visiting 13 Web sites in seven days.
As for the cost of their Internet access, another
BBC piece this week has it that Internet service could soon be cheaper
for millions of Britons because British Telecom has been ordered to revise
a key tariff structure. VNUNET
reports that the UK's ISPs will have the opportunity to pass the resulting
8.5% rate cut along to their Internet customers.
