Lately the significant and growing issues with the internet have become hot topics, both in news reports and personal experience. The benefits of the internet, which has given the world so much in terms of communication and access to information, carry a heavy cost and many serious problems.
Recent news stories have highlighted efforts to solve the problem of sexual predators lurking in social networking sites. Some are introducing legislation that would attempt to deny access to those sites, or perhaps even the internet itself, to convicted sexual predators.
Scammers and spammers have grown to epidemic proportions. The personal impact of this hits me every day, with two of my email accounts filling up with hundreds of spam emails every week. My email accounts segregate what spam they can identify into a separate folder I can clear, but many make it through to my inbox. My daily ritual now begins with deleting all the spam so I can read the "real" emails.
There is one email account that is heavily filtered, in which I have never seen a piece of spam. But that's a mixed blessing, because I often hear from clients who wonder why I didn't respond to an email I never actually received. Aggressive spam filters often end up blocking legitimate email messages.
Companies are building highly restrictive firewalls that trap their employees from being able to access the web. A paranoia at many companies over the potential of an employee visiting a site that could infect the network, plus the assumption that employees would waste valuable work hours surfing the web, have virtually locked employees out of important and helpful internet resources.
Today, part of the reason I'm posting is my web-based training class had to be cancelled. Half of the students scheduled to attend my online class were unable to access the training site, and were unable to find timely IT support to solve the problem. So we rescheduled today's session for Friday.
The internet has become both an invaluable resource and a dangerous path through a medieval forest full of marauders who will steal your identity and your money, vandalize your computer and enslave it to vandalize others', surreptitiously install software on your system to spy on everything you do, and flood your email with unwanted advertisements and pornographic materials.
Legislatures don't seem concerned about solving the real problems of the web, but rather seem more focused on finding ways to tax our use of it and protect the movie and music industries from internet-based copyright infringement. A cynic might suggest that congress is doing their best to arrest 17-year-olds for downloading a music file while ignoring the pedophiles who entice children to meetings that will end up scarring their psyche forever.
But what can really be done? I have some ideas.
Rather than looking to the government to solve the problem which always seems to result in high taxes, bureaucracy, and loss of freedom, why not let the users of the internet solve the problem? Here's how:
1. If you are sending advertising email, you must register with an internet-based clearinghouse. If you are not registered, your email will be flagged as such when it is sent through the web to the recipient address. The flag can then be read by the receiving email program, which can be configured to reject or segregate those emails as spam. This way, no unwanted or unsolicited email has to ever make it through.
2. With registered advertisers, consumers have the ability to easily report them as spammers. This would result in a rating that is also placed in the emails sent from the advertiser, say 1 to 5, where 1 indicates little or no spamming complaints and 5 indicates this is a major spammer. Email systems could be configured to accept or reject these emails based on the rating.
3. Users of social networking sites can already simply report those they suspect of being predators or of misusing the site. The site managers can then act on those reports by suspending access to the predators.
4. Companies should loosen their restrictions on employee web surfing. There's nothing wrong with an employee reading a news site in the morning or shopping on ebay during their lunch break. If an employee is wasting valuable work time surfing the net, that's a management issue that should be addressed by the supervisor with the offending employee. Shutting down internet access for employees simply equates with lazy managers who don't want to deal with the problem directly.
I think that if everyone who uses the net has the opportunity and ability to stop abuse with an easy reporting mechanism, we could all solve most of the problems ourselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment