Invasive Nature of Commericialism

Invasive Nature of Commercialism

For many, the advent of online shopping and advertising has provided almost unlimited worldwide access to information and products that were once only available to a targeted few. People can access information and materials from their homes or work with only a few clicks of a mouse. Commercialization of the Internet has had benefits for both business and the consumer. (Benefits of Commercialization). However, as the rewards of doing business online have grown incredibly fast, so have the concerns about what is happening to the cyberspace environment and to the Internet user's rights. The Web user now has unwanted commercial email appear in the mailboxes, advertising banners, and pop-ups on the screen, and information about the user is mined, collected, and stored in databanks as he explores the Web. Students and adults who once were only subject to passive advertising on radio, television, and the printed media are now often in a constant environment of interactive advertising not only at home, but at school and work as well. They are also subjected to a steady flow of unwanted, and often too good to be true, offers through their email. For educators to explain and alert their students to problems involving commercialism and the Internet, educators must understand what the practices and issues are.

Questions to consider in examining the invasive nature of commercialism include the following:

*   What are the problems and issues associated with unsolicited commercial email?
*   How is users' information collected, stored and used?

Unsolicited Commercial Email (Velveeta, Spam)

Unsolicited commercial email (UCE) has been described by Ray Everett-Church in his U. S. Senate testimony as having the "...potential to harm our economy in ways that terrorists could only dream about." Certainly this issue has caused the formation of the largest (over 10,000 members) Internet advocacy group in the United States, the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE). Unsolicited commercial email comes in two flavors: velveeta and spam. Velveeta is the practice of posting one copy of an unrelated text (usually an advertisement or political diatribe) to a server and them crossposting it to many newsgroups. (A Cultural Transition: The Commercialization of the Internet by Christopher R. Vincent). Spam is the practice of flooding the Internet with the same message to individual email users, or to many usenet groups who would not choose to receive it. The most commonly sent unsolicited commercial email identified by CAUCE and the Federal Trade Commission include the following:

*   Chain letters
*   Pyramid schemes
*   Work at home schemes
*   Get something for free
*   Cable descrambler kits
*   Guaranteed loans or credit on easy terms
*   Get Rich Quick schemes
*   Credit repair scams
*   Vacation prize promotions
*   Offers for phone sex and ads for pornographic Web sites
*   Stock for offerings for unknown start-up corporations
*   Quack health products
*   Illegally pirated software ("Warez").

For those that would like to join the business of UCE, there are also:

*   Offers for making money by sending bulk emailings.
*   Offers for software to collect email addresses.
*   Offers of bulk emailing services for sending UCE.

This offers a new world of online advertising targeting our children and students. They may not receive junk mail addressed to them at home or pay particular attention to advertising in the back of magazines or newspapers, but they will have this type of opportunity offered to them via the Web. Educators need to be aware of both the current practices and the issues involved in discussing unsolicited commercial email with their students. The issues involved associated with spam are freedom of speech, censorship, and the effect of UCE on the operation of the Internet. There is very little written discussion on the positive aspects of UCE. Obviously, the creators of UCE expect to make money with a very small investment. They reject the opposing arguments stating that their actions hurt the operation of the Internet. The two basic positions and their supporting arguments are listed below.

Creators of UCE have the freedom and right to do their business, any type of business unhindered on the Internet.

*   Spam is protected by free speech laws.
*   Blocking spam is censorship.
*   Spam is like "junk" mail.
*   Spam is like telemarketing.
*   Spam is legal.

The many that oppose spam with CAUCE speaking for most, respond with the following arguments.

*Free speech guarantees apply to what you want to say not to the way in which you wish to be heard. Commonsense restrictions prevent harassing phone calls, postage due junk mail, faxes that the recipient bears the cost and advertisements in newspaper that do not meet the publishers guidelines or pay the price for the advertising.
*Censorship is blocking based on content. Spam blocking is labeling according to type (advertising) and placing it in the correct pigeon hole. Just as advertising in the newspaper is not mixed in with hard news stories neither should spam be sent disguised as legitimate email or usenet information.
*Spam is not like "junk" mail. Junk mailers pay for the cost of printing and postage to deliver their junk mail. Spam arrives postage due. Spammers do not pay for disk space charges, connect time, or the paper or computer on which it is read. It is sent at the convenience of the sender and the expense of the recipient.
*Telemarketers are closely regulated: they may not call businesses; they must not call anyone who requests not to be called. *Spammers do not follow any telemarketing restrictions and often harass complainers.
*Spam may be legal or illegal. The explosive growth of commerce on the Internet and the rise of professional spammers has out-paced the knowledge of those at the U. S. FCC which has jurisdiction over interstate junk faxes. Some feel that spam could fall under the junk fax laws. Others feel that it is theft of services which is illegal. Different states are passing different laws which may make some types of spamming illegal in one state or country, and legal in another. (Frequently Asked Questions about Spam)

The facts about the effects of large amounts of unsolicited commercial email on the Internet are negative in a number of respects. First , UCE represents about 30% of all email sent. The sheer volume has caused system outages on AOL, and Netcom.

"Spam is an industry. Mass e-mailers maintain lists of e-mail addresses, often "harvested" by spamware bots - specialized computer applications - from Web sites. These lists are rented out or sold to marketers who use bulk mail services. They come cheap - c. $100 for 10 million addresses. Bulk mailers provide servers and bandwidth, charging c. $300 per million messages sent.

Jupiter Media Matrix predicted in 2001 that the number of spam messages annually received by a typical Internet user will double to 1400 and spending on legitimate e-mail marketing will reach $9.4 billion by 2006 - compared to $1 billion in 2001. Forrester Research pegs the number at $4.8 billion in 2003.

More than 2.3-5 billion spam messages are sent daily. eMarketer puts the figures a lot lower at 76 billion messages in 2002. By 2006, daily spam output will soar to c. 15 billion missives, says Radicati Group. Jupiter projects a more modest 268 billion annual messages this year (2005). An average communication costs the spammer 0.00032 cents." (The Economics of Spam)

For both the large and the smaller Internet Service Providers (ISP) the problems include:

*   CPU's (Central Processing Unit) tied up in processing UCE
*   CPU's tied up with trying to filter UCE
*   Consuming the ISP's bandwidth with tasks associated with the UCE and slowing down Internet access. (CAUCE)

Second, UCE presents the problem of externalities. Externalities is defined by economists as the situation in which benefits and profits come by imposing cost on others. In the case of spammers, the costs to the recipients are much greater than the costs of the sender. As soon as the message leaves the spammer, the cost is borne by others. While it is true that the victims suffer small amounts of damages, less than would be incurred by going out and hiring a lawyer, the entire economy suffers when inefficient businesses distribute their costs across great numbers of victims. (CAUCE) Some system operators have banded together to form consortia such as Open Relay Blocking System and the MAPS Realtime Black hole List to block incoming email from ISP's that do not practice anti-spam measures. (MAPS, SORBS)

In terms of regulation there are three schools of thought. Several have proposed the establishment of Internet communities where banishment from the community or loss of the ISP access would enforce general guidelines. Harvard law school Professor Lawrence Lessig has argued for the creation of a policy-making institution to develop and enforce regulations. While he believes spam is a problem, he states that "the real problem is that vigilantes and network service providers are deciding fundamental policy questions about how the Net will work, each group from its own perspective" (Lessig). A third viewpoint is that of David Johnson and David Post of the Cyberspace Law Institute of Temple University Law School who believe that coercive law enforcement cannot work on a global Internet and enforcement must emerge from the bottom up.

"Rather than relying on the ability of citizens of the global electronic polity to debate thoughtfully in search of a single shared vision of the common good, would be architects of online governance systems should look for a form of civic virtue that can tolerate continuous conflict and can reside in the very architecture of a decentralized, diverse, complex adaptive system" (The New 'Civic Virtue' of the Internet).

In terms of United States policy, the regulation of UCE is still in the formative stages. CAUCE favors a single federal law that would address the issue of redistributing cost from the recipient to the sender. They also favor amending existing laws on junk faxes to include UCE. The Direct Marketing Association favors a federal bill proposed by Murkowski-Torricelli that would require all commercial email to be labeled as advertising and that senders provide for recipients an easy way to get their names removed from mailing lists. The states of Washington, California, and Nevada have passed laws that make it illegal to violate an ISP's terms of service and have established the precedent that junk email is trespassing. A Texas proposal by Carlos Truan is one of the toughest. It would outlaw any unsolicited advertisement that makes the recipient incur any expense or damage. A bill in Virginia would outlaw the use of fake return addresses on spam and require tagging as advertising.

For the educator this means that students and schools will not have legislation at the present to protect them from the nuisance of unsolicited commercial email and that the best defense will be to educate students on the pitfalls and scams offered to them via the Web. In terms of opportunities for discussion, the methods of regulating a non territorial cyberspace world offer many opportunities for students to explore and to discuss how regulation could work.

The United States government, specifically the Federal Trade Commission or FTC, has created a website to help consumers get rid of unwanted spam. They have three webpages set up help consumers limit spam: Ready to Pop Your Top Over "Pop Up Spam"? Here's How to Make it Stop, You've Got Spam: How to "Can" Unwanted Emails, and Putting a Lid on Deceptive Spam. The first site explains how to disable pop ups by disabling windows messanging service and installing firewalls.   The second site explains ways to reduce the amount of spam you can receive. The final site explains how the FTC investigates deceptive spam. It also has sections on different types of spam scams and how to specifically deal with each type, and it also lists how to protect your personal information while online. It also created a website for helping busineses. The business site includes sections on securing your server and honoring unsubscribed claims. It also specifically explains the CAN-SPAM Act which sets requirements for anyone who sends commercial email.

What the law requires:

It bans false or misleading header information. Your email's "From," "To," and routing information – including the originating domain name and email address – must be accurate and identify the person who initiated the email.
It prohibits deceptive subject lines. The subject line cannot mislead the recipient about the contents or subject matter of the message.
It requires that your email give recipients an opt-out method. You must provide a return email address or another Internet-based response mechanism that allows a recipient to ask you not to send future email messages to that email address, and you must honor the requests. You may create a "menu" of choices to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to end any commercial messages from the sender.

Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your commercial email. When you receive an opt-out request, the law gives you 10 business days to stop sending email to the requestor's email address. You cannot help another entity send email to that address, or have another entity send email on your behalf to that address. Finally, it's illegal for you to sell or transfer the email addresses of people who choose not to receive your email, even in the form of a mailing list, unless you transfer the addresses so another entity can comply with the law.
It requires that commercial email be identified as an advertisement and include the sender's valid physical postal address. Your message must contain clear and conspicuous notice that the message is an advertisement or solicitation and that the recipient can opt out of receiving more commercial email from you. It also must include your valid physical postal address.

Penalties

Each violation of the above provisions is subject to fines of up to $11,000. Deceptive commercial email also is subject to laws banning false or misleading advertising.

Additional fines are provided for commercial emailers who not only violate the rules described above, but also:

"harvest" email addresses from Web sites or Web services that have published a notice prohibiting the transfer of email addresses for the purpose of sending email
generate email addresses using a "dictionary attack" – combining names, letters, or numbers into multiple permutations
use scripts or other automated ways to register for multiple email or user accounts to send commercial email
relay emails through a computer or network without permission – for example, by taking advantage of open relays or open proxies without authorization.

The law allows the DOJ to seek criminal penalties, including imprisonment, for commercial emailers who do – or conspire to:

use another computer without authorization and send commercial email from or through it
use a computer to relay or retransmit multiple commercial email messages to deceive or mislead recipients or an Internet access service about the origin of the message
falsify header information in multiple email messages and initiate the transmission of such messages
register for multiple email accounts or domain names using information that falsifies the identity of the actual registrant
falsely represent themselves as owners of multiple Internet Protocol addresses that are used to send commercial email messages. (The CAN-SPAM Act)

Cookies

If unsolicited commercial email presents the problem of getting what one doesn't want, then cookies represents the opposite problem of giving up information that one would rather keep private. A few years ago the IGA grocery store was one of the first in this area to offer the Hometown Value Card (HVC). Shoppers registered their name and address and received a card that offered special savings to the shopper if the shopper presented it before checking out. Some people resented the card and refused to get one saying it was an invasion of their privacy for the store to have a record of their purchases. Others said they didn't really care if the store had a record of what they bought as long as they received the store discount on certain purchases. Cookies on the Internet are light years ahead of the HVC card. Cookies allow an advertiser to silently and surreptitiously gather information on the consumer to custom tailor their advertising to the consumer and in the process collect highly specific pieces of information about the consumer. This information may be collected on databases to form a detailed profile of the computer user. The United States has no specific law of privacy to protect the consumer. The Federal Trade Commission last year found that 85 percent of Web sites collect some personal information, but only 14 percent posted privacy policies.

Questions to consider about cookies:

*   Does the consumer have the right to know when information is being collected?
*   Does the consumer have the right to shop or look anonymously?
*   Do certain types of advertising "mold" the consumer?
*   Should advertisers have the right to sell the information gathered?

A cookie is a specific piece of information that a Website server gives to the client's browser when the browser and the server first meet. Every time the consumer visits that Web site the server and the browser share a file, a cookie, that gives information and is used to store more information on the current visit. For example, the search engine Lycos uses cookies to tailor the advertising banners that the user will see. A perfect example of this was the Lycos search engine. Whenever you searched, the cookie that Lycos had put on computer earlier, would track what you searched for and what you viewed. It would then send this information back to Lycos where the server would put up only banners concerning what you were searching for. This is online tracking. (Commercialism on the Internet) If the user has frequently searched the Net for a particular type of music, the advertising banners run for that user will be about that type of music. InfoSeek uses cookies to capture behavior information to narrow Internet searches based on previous patterns of searches dictated by the cookie.

For the advertiser, the use of cookies has a number of benefits. The greatest benefit is one-to-one marketing based on the user's interest and previous purchase patterns. The actual content of the page is defined by the viewer's interests. Cookies also allow better monitoring of advertising effectiveness and enable marketers to refine their Web sites to make them easier to use. If a user normally only clicks three times before leaving a site, the advertiser can move a desired section to an earlier position in the click-stream. Cookies are also able to monitor the time spent at a Web site and to monitor which pages the user actually clicked on (Commercialism of the World Wide Web: The Role of Cookies).

Advertisers claim that cookies benefit users by reducing "banner burnout", and by tailoring advertising to what the user is interested in based on past patterns of interest. The opposing viewpoint is expressed by Evan Hendricks in a Privacy Times article, "Cookies represent a coming effort by organizations to monitor people's interest in their products through the covert gathering of personal data without their knowledge and consent." As more consumers prefer to keep such information private, newer versions of Netscape and Microsoft Explorer have options to turn off cookies. Software such as Cookie Monster 1.5, Internet Fast Forward and NSClean32 have been developed to filter cookies or automatically cleanup cookie files so that users can not be tracked. Some sites add a "middle man" such as Anonymizer or NetAngels between the user and the Web site to filter cookies to protect privacy. WebTV and users of AOL cannot receive cookies. If these continue to grow in popularity, there will also be limits to where cookies may be collected. Other public interest organizations such as eTrust identify web sites that ensure a user's privacy and rate how well the privacy is protected. (Commercialism of the World Wide Web: The Role of Cookies).

Perhaps the most serious concerns about privacy in the commercial Internet involve the use of technology used by the advertiser DoubleClick. DoubleClick is an Internet advertising broker that targets its ads very narrowly. DoubleClick is known for its successful use of technology for 3M. By filtering out 3M ads that have been seen by the user three times without a click, DoubleClick has increased 3M's click rates on banners to about 7% compared to the the Web's average of about 3%. In March of 1999 DoubleClick had over 60 advertising sites. Whenever a user visits any of those sites, the DoubleClick server creates a cookie that is stored on the computer. DoubleClick builds a complete dossier on the user based on the compiled information from those 60 different sites. This profiling is more extensive than what any other advertiser has done and profiles have been done for over ten million Web users. Although DoubleClick does not currently have a market to sell any cross-matched user profiles, the potential market is there.

For now the use of cookies has one serious problem that does not make it as threatening to privacy as it could be. Cookies record information on the computer usage not the user. In the case of schools and other places where multiple people use the same computers the information collected is based on all the people that use the computer rather than an individual's use. However, if a user registers their name and address, all activity could be linked to a specific user.

Federal Trade Commission Chairman Robert Pitofsky warned direct marketers that they should have meaningful pledges guarding against the misuses of information gathered from their clients in place by the summer of 1999 or the misuses will lead to federal regulation. This warning was issued in part after GeoCities sold information gathered during its registration process to outside marketers. GeoCities had an explicit online statement that it would not sell such information but did sell demographic information such as income, education, marital status, occupation and personal interests to other firms. The FTC charged GeoCities with "misrepresenting the purpose for which it was collecting personal identifying information from children and adults."

Peter McGrath has stated that "It's not government that threatens privacy today; it's Internet commerce. The Web has evolved into a marketplace, and in the process transformed privacy from a right to a commodity." Databases contain vast amounts of personal information, particularly from Web users, and are available from companies such as myprospects.com for the price of only sixteen cents a name. "Clickstream" monitoring, a page by page tracking of people as they travel through a Website combined with "collaborative filtering" which infers likes and dislikes based on comparing user profiles with others in the database has allowed marketers to refine monitoring, the gathering of information, and advertising to a science. The question is how will that information be used.

The advertiser's position appears to be that I really do not need to tell you that I am gathering information, because I am doing this for your own good: the more I know about you, the better I'll be able to help you. The opposing viewpoint is that I have the right to know if information is being gathered; I have the choice to reveal or not reveal information about myself; and if I choose to reveal that information, I have the right to restrict where that information will go and how it will be used. If information has become a commodity, then perhaps like the grocery HVC card, the client should be able to deny information by not using the card or to receive compensation for revealing personal information. As Peter McGrath has stated, "After all, your information is your property; why should someone else use it to create value without sharing the proceeds?"

The educator's role is primarily that of making students aware of the invasive nature of commercialism and their rights to privacy. The educator must inform students about their potential loss of privacy through the use of cookies and the networking of databases. Students must be taught techniques to protect themselves from cookies if they choose not to reveal information about their shopping habits and preferences. Students should be able to recognize sites that have pledged to protect the consumer's privacy. Students must also be alerted to the possible, though subtle effect, of having their advertising custom tailored or perhaps limited, by what marketers feel will sell best to a particular demographic group or the cookies collected by a user's casual wanderings through the Web.    Back to School Means Back to Advergames, an article by Sue Zeidler, discusses how acceptable use policies do not protect students from online advertising and its impact on students in general.