privacy laws
From FixForwarding, something can be done for the email
By privacy laws we mean any of the legal frameworks that regulate information privacy in the USA, EU, and several national countries. Although not exactly uniform, the existing bodies of rules tend to converge toward certain principles aimed at protecting people against undiscriminated usage of collected personally identifiable information, a.k.a. personal data.
Freedom in the digital era
Advancements in electronics allow to exercise pervasive and widespread control on what the people do. Digital control can provide for appealing means for implementing commercial practices on unprecedentedly wide scales. While customers used to be able to guard against a shopkeeper foxiness by themselves, they are defenseless when confronted with large business enterprises who systematically exchange their customers' PI information with one another.
As it often happens during the transition from an era to the next, criteria and even laws that have been stipulated in times when their enforcement was provided by radically different means, may become questionable. The efforts undertaken thus far to define the legal terms and the issues implied by the new scenario, are the first chisel blows for establishing the future shape.
The Internet protocols that make this all possible, including SMTP, have necessarily been designed before it all began.
Implementing the law
Opt-in and opt-out are two key concept for regulating how commercial newsletters may be sent. The SMTP protocol talks about mailing lists, not newsletters. Technically, they are the same thing, since the exact working of the subscribe and unsubscribe operations is not specified rigorously.
RFC 2369 mandates some headers with special URLs. The List-Unsubscribe header field contains the command to directly unsubscribe from the list. However, mail clients usually don't show it to the user. A possible reason for that uncooperative behavior may lay in the unknown nature of the command, that may expose the user to security risks if programmed by a malicious sender.
In addition, whatever method of subscribe or unsubscribe gets executed, users are given just a notice of the outcome of the operation, that they seldom save or print. The data remains at the lists owners', which makes it hard to take legal stances. There is no need to take legal actions, because legitimate senders always honor users commands; however, such tautological statements contribute to make spam a fuzzy term.
An email address is considered personally identifiable data. The agreement of its owner is required for storing and using that data. Its owner has the right to amend or delete it. It is the law. The solution proposed provides for a standard unsubscribe method, and provides for a copy of the users commands to be kept by their ESPs.
An example
Alice used to work for example.com. When she left, she asked the postmaster to place a .forward file for her, in order to continue to receive personal mail. After a few years, only spam is being forwarded. She would like the forwarding recipe to be removed. However, the postmaster she knew also left the company.
Of course, she could make an official request to the company. That implies getting in touch with her former boss. However, she wouldn't like to call him. Possibly, for the same reasons that she left the company years ago.
Asking someone else to do something for us, is not the same as doing it directly. Does the term wiki teach anything in this respect?
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