Facebook and MySpace leading fight against spam
Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace may actually be good for something other than allowing people you no longer like to be able to get in touch with you: fighting spam, and the tools behind unsolicited mass emails.
Spam has been around for as long as the Internet has. In fact, it celebrated 30 years of being in existence in May of 2008 after the first mass unsolicited mail was sent to 400 people on the US government-run Arpanet back in 1978.
While there have always been laws to fight the people behind spam, and high-profile legal cases to go with it, most of these have done nothing to lessen the problem. But it seems social networking sites could now be fighting the good fight, with Facebook and MySpace taking the lead in pursuing cases against heavy spammers all the way to court.
An article on Law.com reports on a lawsuit filed last week by Facebook against Canadian Adam Guerbuez. Between March and April of this year, he is accused of sending more than 4 million messages to Facebook members trying to sell products such as marijuana and penis enlargement pills.
May saw MySpace won a $230 million judgement against Sanford Wallace, while in June, the social network won a $6 million settlement from Scott Richter and his Media Breakaway company.
Unfortunately, these high-profile cases are still rare. It’s still hard to locate the people behind so much of the spam that ends up in our inboxes, and even if they are caught, they rarely turn up in court to face the charges.
So some of the cases are merely for public relations reasons, with MySpace and Facebook following in the footsteps of companies such as Microsoft and AOL who fought similar campaigns against spammers a decade ago.
The advantage the social networks have is that the spammers have to sign up for an account in order to send messages to their customers victims. This not only helps in tracking the culprits but it also adds a layer of legal cover due to the anti-spam agreement included in the terms of use.
John Dozier Jr. of Dozier Internet Law thinks that just like Microsoft and AOL, social networking sites will drop their high-profiles suits after a short period. Instead, micro-blogging sites such as Twitter will take over the fight against spam. So long as someone is doing so, I don’t mind who it is.
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