Re: [Asrg] Proposal for Opt-Out

On Friday, March 28, 2003, at 07:24  AM, Kee Hinckley wrote:

> Frankly, opt-out scares the hell out of me.

and any opt-out system is either going to have to have the buy-in of 
the e-marketers voluntarily, or be stuffed down their throat through 
legislation. And you can bet if they aren't interested in voluntarily 
buying into it, it won't go easy being legislated.
So any opt-out system has to also deal with the needs and interests of 
the e-marketers. If it's designed and built unilaterally, it'll be a 
non-starter, and while this is a technical forum, it shouldn't be 
coming up with things that are politically infeasible, since that's a 
waste of time.
So if there's going to discussions of building systems that other 
groups have to agree to use, those groups need to be involved at some 
level, too. Maybe not now, but liason to them one decisions are made to 
go in that direction.
(I'll say again, however, that you can fix every legitimate e-marketer 
in existance perfectly, exactly the way you want it in your dreams, and 
most users won't ever notice because of all of the spam in their 
mailboxes. I think opt-out systems are worthy of exploring, NEXT. Until 
the issue of spam and spam volumes are dealt with, nothing else matters 
here. Opt-out systems are polishing the brass on the Titanic. Deal with 
the iceberg first!)
I think the problem is we keep migrating back into "fixing the 
e-marketing space" because we at least can find and talk to those 
folks, where spam is a much nastier, intractable problem. the problem, 
though, is that it ends up solving problems that don't solve the 
problem, which is that 42% of the mail that I wake up to every morning 
is spam, and I have a high-volume inbox. And I compare that with the 
10-15 pieces of email a week I get from e-marketers (amazon, orbitz, 
etc), and frankly, that's just not The Problem here. It's sara and her 
pet zebra. Twelve times.
Working with the e-marketing people is a good thing. Coming up with 
standards for consent systems (whether they're opt-in, opt-out or 
whatever, it boils down to a consent system) is a good thing. 
Standardizing EULAs and how they're presented is a very good thing. 
Anything we can do to help users get a more standard environment that 
works reliably in that space is a very good thing -- but it won't solve 
the problem, and even if all of that got implemented perfectly, this 
forum would be an abject failure if sara's e-mail keeps showing up in 
my mailbox every day.
Yes, it's the tougher problem, but if it's not solved, nothing else 
matters.
IMHO, of course.

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