There's a new EU report out on spam -- full text here. In Holland, officials apparently cut spam by 85 percent, via some kind of government body called the OPTA, which the report says has just 5 full-time employees and 570,000 Euros (about $750 K) invested in equipment. The EU says it would like to duplicate that kind of success, and return on investment, throughout Europe. Apparently EU anti-spam regulations exist but many countries haven't put them to use.

Posted by Beau Brendler at 01:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Is there such a thing as "safe shopping" online these days?
The answer: Yes. Over the past decade, as e-commerce has grown up, a lot of people worried that typing a credit card number into a Web site was an instant guarantee someone would hijack that information on its way to the online store and copy it somehow.
That's about as likely, probably, as someone in your bank's customer service call center copying down your info, then using it to buy stuff in a nearby neighborhood. Hey, it happened to Citibank.
More worrisome is what the site might do with your information once it's captured. It may be susceptible to hackers, or worse, the online store you are using has subcontracted data storage to a third party. We know what can happen when that happens.

Since today, the Monday after the Thanksgiving Holiday, is supposed to be one of the biggest e-commerce shopping days of the year, The UnSponsored Link gives you an early Christmas present in the form of timeless online shopping tips:
1. Take a look at the Consumer Reports WebWatch guidelines for credible Web sites. These function not only as guidelines for Web publishers to help them build better sites, but as a consumer "bill of rights" stating the minimum a consumer should expect from any Web site.
2. Take a look to the left hand side of this blog's home page. You'll find lists of good sites and possibly not-so-good sites. Don't go shopping on the not-so-good sites.
3. Don't buy laptops site unseen from sellers in Romania.
4. Once you've found a site you like, make sure the really important pages where you enter your personal stuff are secure pages (the URL starts with https, the "s" for secure). Look for a padlock icon in your browser, at the top of the window, or at the bottom. Some browsers do better putting the padlock next to the URL of the site you're on, and then color-coding the URL after matching the site's information with a registry or digital certificate.
5. If you're using a shopping "bot" or shopping "tool" or big aggregator site like Amazon.com, make sure to familiarize yourself with the policies of the merchant you are working with. Check what protections the host site gives you.
6. Make sure your favorite shopping tool or bot has a facility that allows you to organize information by price, so you're looking at a list of the best prices of the thing you want to buy, not a list ordered by which merchant paid how much money to be there.
7. Look at user feedback ratings. Don't buy anything from a merchant with fewer than...how many feedbacks? 100? 1,000? Depends on your risk tolerance. It's a pretty big job to generate 1,000 false feedbacks. The point is, be careful of "new merchants" unless they have some sort of certification from the shopping tool site, or the shopping tool site offers protections. And contribute to the process! If you have a good experience, leave a good feedback. If you had a bad experience, state just the facts, in order to warn other consumers. (If you get vindictive and nasty in your feedback, you may find yourself on the wrong end of a lawsuit).
8. Don't forget the shipping charges! A lot of merchants leave them out of their "total price," making it look like you are getting a better deal. As you're making the purchase you find out the shipping charges bring the price up to what everyone else is charging.
9. If you're really nervous about the whole thing, shop the online stores of real-world brands you already trust. They're not going to endanger their offline reputation.
10. Figure out how much privacy you care about, and fill out information on the site accordingly. Know that the site you are shopping will capture as much information about you as possible for its own purposes, so it can send you targeted e-mails and such. Some people like that stuff. But make sure you opt out if the site's privacy policy says it will share your data with other people. In the offline world, is your mailbox jammed with more and more catalogs every year? If the answer is yes, it's because...you've probably bought stuff from catalogs! So the merchants sell your shopping behavior information to other merchants, who in turn send you catalogs for "like-minded" people.

Posted by Beau Brendler at 04:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Macleans magazine piece on the Internet is now online here. Predictably, it's spawned some discussion, some of it interesting.

I read a couple bits of this article out loud, probably to the audience's chagrin, at the recent U.S. Federal Trade Commission hearings on what consumers might expect to face online in the next 10 years. A concern of mine is that "consumer education," a buzzword/cliche in the advocacy world, has been a failure. Money lost to Nigerian 419 scams continues to increase year over year. Depending on whom you ask, identity theft is on the increase. And this study, mentioned at the hearings, unequivocally points out that consumers don't understand what privacies they give up as they become deeper users of Web sites. One of the report's authors has been a WebWatch adviser since we started out five years ago.
While you're at it, it's worth reading this study from the same author and others.

Attendance at the FTC's hearings was not exactly robust -- it was election week, after all. But as moderators on panels asked for a show of hands on a variety of topics, it became pretty plain that most of the 200-or-so people in attendance each day were FTC staff, lawyers, think-tank people and others. Not too many consumers at all.

Posted by Beau Brendler at 03:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)