The E-mail Sender and Provider Coalition is getting support from an online anti-cyber-stalking activist group in its fight against so-called child protection do-not-e-mail registries.
Jayne Hitchcock, founder of the all-volunteer group Working to Halt Online Abuse, or WHOA, said she is "appalled" by the child no-e-mail laws currently in effect in Utah and Michigan, and similar bills being considered in Iowa, Hawaii, Georgia, Connecticut and Wisconsin.
Hitchcock, who established WHOA in 1997 after being harassed online, said she plans to lobby against the state registries by writing letters to the appropriate state legislators and testifying against them in person if necessary.
Hitchcock is now among the critics—which include the Federal Trade Commission—of children's no-e-mail registries who contend that not only are these registries unlikely to protect children, they may result in online predators gaining access to registered addresses.
"If these e-mail addresses get into the wrong hands, it could be worse than the things we already see in the media," said Hitchcock.
Parents in Michigan and Utah can register minors' e-mail addresses and other "contact points" as off limits to messages containing material or links to material it is illegal for them to view or buy. Marketers who want to include such material related to, say, alcohol or gambling, are supposed to scrub their lists against these registries for a fee each month.
WHOA joins an already highly unusual alliance of groups against the registries. Online pornography group the Free Speech Coalition in November sued Utah trying to gets its registry law overturned.
In January, marketing trade groups the ESPC, the American Advertising Federation, the American Association of Advertising Agencies, the Association of National Advertisers, and civil liberties groups the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology filed court papers supporting the Free Speech Coalition.
WHOA's Hitchcock said she is against the idea that the same company that is lobbying for the states to pass registry laws—Unspam—is also running the two registries currently in existence and profiting from them.
"It's bad enough that they're trying to start a registry that could do a lot of harm," she said. "In addition to that, they're making money off of it. The reason they're for these laws is they're going to make money from it."
Unspam claims its system is secure against hacking and that as a result of its technique, which involves creating "e-mail fingerprints" to scrub senders' lists, e-mail addresses on the registries are safe. The company's president, Matthew Prince, also claims he has a scheme in place to detect abuse by senders.
However, critics note that no matter how much security Unspam has, a rogue employee of a company—many of which in this case are online pornographers—using the states' registries to scrub its lists could easily reverse engineer the process to get a verified sub-list of kids' e-mail addresses. All they would have to do is compare the list Unspam returned with the one they sent to know that the addresses that are no longer on the list are those of children.
Also, critics note, Unspam's system has the potential to put sub-lists of children's e-mail addresses in thousands of online pornographers' databases, making the odds of coming in contact with that rogue employee that much higher.
Hitchcock regularly speaks to groups of parents to educate them about the dangers that lurk online for their children. She also trains law enforcement personnel on Internet issues.
She is the author of seven books, the latest entitled "Net Crimes and Misdemeanors, Outmaneuvering the Spammers, Swindlers and Stalkers Who Are Targeting You Online."
