Privacy Commissioner Demands War on Spam
March 2, 2007 · By Joel
Canada’s privacy commissioner is calling on the government to outlaw the growing plague of spam e-mails playing a part in a multi- billion-dollar industry of fraud and identity theft.
Jennifer Stoddart says Canada is the only G8 nation without anti-spam legislation and is now cited internationally as the sixth-largest source of the nuisance and sometimes harmful e-mails.
“The time for action on these issues is now,” Stoddart said yesterday. “The federal government needs to act strongly against spam.”
Little strange for the Privacy Commissioner to be demanding government intrusion into the one sector of our lives that’s relatively free from state interference, don’t you think? In any case, is she really so naive as to think that legislation will have any impact on spam one way or another — especially beyond our borders. Last time I checked, the most infamous con around was called the Nigerian scam, not the Canadian scam.
Fortunately, wonder of wonders, people don’t need the help of government to eradicate spam. Hell, even free, web-based services like Gmail have pretty good spam filters, but with a little research, and a few minutes’ effort, you can set up a very robust filtering system for any account.
She should be fired soon though, no?
This seems to be “advocacy” of a policy position to me.
We fire Commissioners for that right?
We certainly did back in January!
Who’s we? Auditor-General Fraser asked Ms. Gelinas to leave her post of Environmental Commissioner and that was her decision alone — there’s no parliamentary officer superior to Stoddart to fire her, and I really doubt the government would do so.
It’s kind of typical of you conservatives to see government as the only threat to privacy. The corporate (yes, that’s private, folks) world is far more of a threat to privacy.
Here’s a tip, read the post.
Where did Joel say anything about anything like “government [is] the only threat to privacy”?
You guys have been really touchy and defensive lately. Is everything ok?
Well, I’m a small-c conservative, and I think the government should have a go at (canada):
– making initiation of spam illegal;
– making the transmission of trojans, spyware, keyloggers, etc., a punishable crime;
– making initiation of phishing illegal;
– making identity theft a specific crime;
And, to be merciful, to allow only sentences of death for breaking these laws.
Seriously, though, few average Canadians know how to deal effectively with spam. And the phishing and trojan stuff is still coming through despite (at least) my ISP checking it twice (once with internal scanners, once with an O/S company).
And, “Sick of Tory Ranting” … did it ever occur to you that the reason Tories like to rant so much is to drive you Flipper-lovers around the bend? Wonderful fun.