Entry No.132

IT Writers Awards

There's been a lot of debate lately about "who can own what" in the electronic world. Do you have any firm thoughts on what ownership you have over data that concerns you? Is there information about you that's publicly available that you'd rather keep private?

US commentator Ken Freed (www.kf.com) came out to speak at the recent Internet World show in Sydney. Freed maintains that just about anything about him should stay private, if he wants it to be. He thinks his street address is private information, and he should choose who has it. And he certainly thinks that his e-mail address isn't something that should be passed around willy-nilly. Every time begets a piece of junk mail he wonders how the spammer got the address-An other words, he wonders which supposedly respectable Web site or business that he's visited has sold or swapped the information, or if someone has "plundered"' a newsgroup or chat 'stolen' his e-mail address.

While l'm not quite as hardline as Freed, I agree tat there is too much liberty taken with the use of someone's e-mail address. After all, if you're paying by time and traffic for your Internet access, the last thing you want is to be paying money to download unwanted junk mail. I have three ideas I'd like to propose, all to do with spam e-mail. I'd like your feedback on them, please.

Traceable email addresses

Part of the problem with your e-mail address is that you never know how someone got it. Why not have a public/private key system that would give you a different e-mail address for every person you give it to. A server somewhere would take your real e-mail address and your private key and the name of the person or organisation you want to give the address to. So paul@zucker.com  might become l526ghtyO9876qoot, which I then give to AMP when I'm requesting an insurance quote. When they (or anyone else) use 1526ghty09876qoot to send me an e-mail, it gets through just as if they'd sent it to paul@zucker.com, but I also get a notification with the e-mail that the e-mail came to the address I'd given to AMP. So when I get junk mail from a wine club, I know that AMP has sold part of its database. Because the address uses a look-up system that only I can access, that e-mail can only have come from the AMP list. Even years later I'll know how someone has obtained my e-mail address.

Micro email payments

The best part about e-mail is the fact that it's free. That's also the worst part of it. If it costs a spainmer next to nothing to send a million pieces of junk e-mail, what's the disincentive? But if there is a 1c levy on all e-mails, those million messages would cost $10,000 and that's not chicken feed. Your hundred outgoing messages a week would cost just a dollar, which won't break the bank. All the money could go to charity.

Spam alert

Your ISP probably isn't legally entitled to read your e-mails and delete those it thinks are spam. But if it could (with your permission), it would save money for you and the ISP. Spammers tend to use different, fake return addresses each time they send spam so that doesn't give you a way to trap junk mail. So what about a cooperative service, where members guarantee to spend a few minutes a week reading their e-mail as it arrives, and immediately forwarding it to a central site if it's spam? That way, an up-to-date list of spam could be circulated to ISPs so they can simply delete the junk mail as it arrives. The details would be sent in the form of a signature file, like virus detectors so it shouldn't clog the Internet.

Any comments?

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