Selling Your Attention to Spammers 307
Dotnaught writes "Can the free market stop spam where technology has failed? As described in InformationWeek, Professor Marshall Van Alstyne of Boston University School of Management has co-authored a soon-to-be-published paper that proposes an "attention bond" -- money put up by email senders that recipients collect only if they consider the message a waste of time. Supposedly, this market-based filter performs better than a perfect technology-based solution, with no false positives or negatives. A company called Vanquish already has a working model. Is selling one's attention the answer to spam?"
How is this a solution again? (Score:4, Insightful)
I must be missing something...it seems like the same tactics spammers use to evade law enforcement today could be used to evade the imposition of this "attention bond mechanism".
tax? (Score:2, Insightful)
Sounds like a fancy way of taxing the internet...
The one big problem... (Score:3, Insightful)
The other thing that can happend is that it is so hard to cash out this money, that noone will bother, since it'll be likely to take twice the time of hitting delete, or the sum has to be big enough to be worth the hassle ($1?) which agains brings us to the first point, people will cash out on every email.
Human Greed... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yet another misguided solution (Score:5, Insightful)
It's similar to the argument that gun rights advocates make - stricter gun control laws or programs will hurt legitimate owners, but the real problems will still lie with the criminals who don't abide by those laws anyway.
Crack down on spammers. Make spam outright illegal and make penalties for ISPs that fail to comply.
Different financial cost (Score:4, Insightful)
Third world countries will find that sort of money a huge barrier to entry for sending email.
Similarly this will be open to google ad type exploitation. People will set up email addresses and sign up to all sorts of solicited and unsolicited email just to collect the cash. Again for people in poorer countries this might be a practical job.
Why not just make them pay? (Score:3, Insightful)
This is pretty basic stuff. The problem with spam is that spammers are continually finding ways to pay nothing to advertise. If one person in a thousand replies to a message you paid nothing for and sends you $50, you've made almost double the profits vs. if you had to pay 2 cents per recipient. That's always going to be an attractive market for people with useless crap to sell, because the real rate of return on crap might be considerably less than one in a thousand.
This plan gives people the warm fuzzies because it sounds like each individual will be able to profit from unwanted advertising, but in reality it would never work that way. On the other hand, you'd get the same "punitive" effect on spammers if you just found a way to force them to pay to send spam.
A rhetorical question (Score:2, Insightful)
What is it with the money-for-email idea? (Score:5, Insightful)
But what amazes me is that like clockwork, somebody will publish an article on this "great new idea" for dealing with spam, several times a year it seems. They have clearly read none of the spam literature, nor done a search. And on top of that, journals and magazines also think it's new and publish the items, even slashdot publishes them.
What gives?
Ah! (Score:4, Insightful)
Professor Marshall Van Alstyne of Boston University School of Management
That pretty much explains it.
Re:Automated Spam Response (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:typical of economics (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Can they really afford my time? (Score:2, Insightful)
An attention market would even be useful in a non-commercial context. An executive like Bill Gates could price access to his inbox to reflect the value of his time. And those who had legitimate reasons to correspond with Microsoft's chairman could rest easy, knowing that he wouldn't cash in the substantial bond required to get his attention.
In other words, the more you make per hour, the less spam you will recieve - in the true nature of the new corporate owned and controlled Internet(tm)(patent pending).
Re:Automated Spam Response (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why not just make them pay? (Score:3, Insightful)
But should I have to pay to send you an e-mail you just asked for (i.e., "I forgot my password")? Or should my brother's e-mail of a link to pictures of my niece's birthday party cost him money to send? And, who's collecting? The point is that you'll be unable to make the distinction between commercial and private messages. It's not the same as buying an ad in the yellow pages.
Re:Should be a money-maker (Score:4, Insightful)
RTFA. The premise is that once you mark an address as spam, the sender will no longer send you messages because it's against his economic interest to pay you again. Therefore, you only receive payment once per mailing list, which will be too small to make it a feasible source of income.
Unfortunately, this system will only work if you only allow incoming mail from a server that supports it. This reduces the whole setup to a glorified whitelist, and dooms it to failure. Spam can't be stopped because the current infrastructure allows spammers to send mail without reprimand, and no alternative will work until the current infrastructure is still in place.
Re:Automated Spam Response (Score:3, Insightful)
Either way has anyone noticed that this list seems to have changed over the years. I swear it has, I'll have to go find some achieves of old versions.
The answer tp the spam problem is... (Score:3, Insightful)
If we educate the users/unwashed masses(what every you want to call them) that BUYING from the SPAMMERS is A BAD IDEA(TM) and only makes the problem worse, the users might not buy cheap tobacco/blue pills/radio controlled cars/fake rolexes from the adverts.
Would the small minority please stop supporting this crud, then maybe I wouldn't stop one week fighting trojans nd the next fight the spam they've started spawning (Sober.o/p and sober.q).
Re:How is this a solution again? (Score:3, Insightful)
To answer your question, the reason spammers can't hide from this is that they have to pay money to send messages via this mechanism.
In the limit case, you can choose to receive messages ONLY from people who send mail this way. Even your friends would pay money to send you email, but since you'd mark all of their messages as "worthwhile" it wouldn't cost them anything.
You'd get no spam, but you'd lose the ability to get mail from anonymous sources. Sometimes you want that (e.g. potential customers sending you questions.) It would also make it hard to subscribe to things like joke-of-the-day services, since they'd have to filter out dimwits who subscribe and then mark the message as worthless to receive the attention bond.
If you don't go all the way, you can still set messages coming from this service to bypass your spam filter. Existing spammers can continue to spam, but they risk being filtered out. It would help you tune your spam filter better.
This is aimed at people genuinely marketing genuine products via mass-email. They're basically paying you to read their ad, which means that they're going to be a bit more selective about whom they send it to. This is spam sent by people who don't wish to hide, to people who wish to read it.
Say you're a grocery store and you want to send out coupons every week. You send your message out via this server, and pay $.01 per person to guarantee that the message is worthwhile. Then you have some mechanism so that you only send it to real opt-ins, who somehow guarantee that they won't take the money. The message goes out, people get their coupons, and you get all of your "attention bond" back.
The "some mechanism" for guaranteeing only opt-ins is the tricky part; it's prone to people scamming it for the cash. So there are variations of this plan, but basically they all crumble under the weight of lots of small bits of money moving around, which is currently too expensive to solve.
So I hope that explains the thing you think you're missing: spammers can't hide because they don't want to hide. They want you to read it and are willing to pay in advance. They're then free to spew all they want, but it'll cost them big time. Spam only works when it's basically free, since the response rate is so low.
It fails, but not because the spammers hide.
Re:Why is it so difficult to stop spam? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not to mention privacy issues...would I want an ex-boyfriend/girlfriend with a grudge being able to query this info on mass etc etc
Also most spam-ware has it's own SMTP engine and sends direct to the MX address (or secondary is quite popular too).
Re:brilliant, but complicated (Score:4, Insightful)
Overly complex, ineffective, and useless.
Who collects and distributes these (micro)payments?
Who enforces that the mailserver supports this?
In the event of someone getting zombied, who is liable? Especially in the event that the zombied box is fully patched.
How does a 13 year old from a dirt poor country send an email from the shared village PC to a uni professor in London or NYC? Where is his escrow acct?
What about anon email accts? How is my bank/paypal/whatever tied to that? (Not that I want it that way)
How does a free, but popular mailing list afford the escrow acct needed to cover new recipients?
There are a host of other problems that we haven't even begun to consider.
Re:Should be a money-maker (Score:3, Insightful)
I did reread his comment, before posting, and I read it to mean receiving multiple messages from one list. I thought he might have meant what you said too, but I was sure he meant what I addressed. Hence the clarification.
But for what it's worth, the alternative that you tried to explain doesn't work either. What exactly makes you think that you're only on the receiving end of this system? If I ran a mailing list, I would make damn sure that you can only sign up for it using email, and not through a web interface. That way, if you decided to flag a message from the list to make me owe you a few cents, I'd flag your subscription email, and you'd owe me those few cents back. Hence, you get nothing.
As for getting a clue, you might want to shut up until you get one.
Re:Obligatory (Score:3, Insightful)
Spammers aren't going to pay money. Spammers profit by stealing resources. It's a tremendous leap of faith to assume that any significant percentage of spammers would buy into such a boneheaded idea, but then again, coming from a college professor (who likely has very little real world business experience), it's not surprising.
Your idea is so 1996 (Score:3, Insightful)
Bill Gates put this idea in The Road Ahead back in 1996. Basically, in order to send an unsolicited message, you have to attach some e-cash to it. If it's just a message from some long lost friend presumably you won't actually redeem the attached e-cash.
Anyway, like a million other ideas about solving spam, it'd work if you could just convince everyone in the world to adopt it. Convincing everyone in the world to switch over to the new system is left as an exercise for the reader.
RTFA - You're incorrect too. Here's why (Score:4, Insightful)
() Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
-- it doesn't appear to use this - it appears to be recipient's-end charging, which can be deployed in a decentralized manner
() Open relays in foreign countries
-- those don't matter here - if they sender doesn't pay, the recipient doesn't read it, and relays only make it harder to pay.
(*) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
-- you correctly marked "whitelists suck", which is part of why it's hard to implement this one correctly.
(*) Users of email will not put up with it
-- this is the big problem with TMDA, hashcash, and many similar systems
(*) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
-- you missed this one too. See previous.
() Requires too much cooperation from spammers
-- not a problem. This one requires cooperation from non-spammers.
() Unpopularity of weird new taxes
-- unless I grossly misread the article, this doesn't apply here - the sender pays the recipient or recipient's ISP, not some third party.
(*) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
-- Yup. Either you need weird new money or old-fashioned real money, and the latter is usually too expensive per transaction.
(??) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
-- Maybe. If enough people start using this, and there's a convenient mail-sender interface so senders don't need to pay attention very often, then worms will start to abuse it. Otherwise they won't care, and the five people who still use it will have whitelisted each other.
() Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
-- Doesn't hurt the recipient, who sets the price high enough that he's willing to read an occasional Nigerian Herbal Fake Vi***a ad and keep their $5 just to annoy them. This proposal suffers from dishonest recipients, who convince legitimate that they should be willing to pay the money to get the recipient's attention. It's a serious enough problem that it can even lead to "Make Money Fast By Reading Email At Home" spammers inviting you to become a recipient
() Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
-- Because you want me to read your mail. Don't care? Don't send money, and I'll ignore you. If I'm a sufficiently interesting public figure, like Rush Limbaugh or Daily Kos or the Editor of the New York Times or Britney Spears, maybe you'll pay to get my attention. Alternatively, maybe the fact that I'm charging for my attention will make you think I'm some over-inflated ego who's not worth the effort, and my 15 minutes of fame will time out faster.
(*) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
-- My conclusions's a bit more positive than yours