Tulsi Gabbard performs a public service
5 March 2020
Back in August of 2019, the Tulsi Gabbard campaign (“Tulsi Now, Inc.”) sued Google after Google temporarily suspended the campaign’s Adwords account after the first Democratic Presidential Candidate Debates (Marinucci & Strauss, 2019). Earlier this week, in a move that should have surprised absolutely no one, the judge in the case threw out the lawsuit…
Policy exists for business reasons
2 March 2020
We live in a politically polarized world. Everyone wants exactly what they want and will only take it exactly as they would like it. You only need to look at the 2020 US Elections to see that. The New York Times has a wonderful example of that from the left: The movement’s identity is based…
How to handle spamtraps
27 February 2020
So, you’ve discovered that your customer has an issue with spamtraps on a mailing list. What do you do now? As a rule, spamtraps end up on a list due to problems with permission or hygiene. No, that’s not exclusive of other things, nor is it necessarily an indication that policies have been violated. But,…
Spamtraps are not the problem
24 February 2020
When you go to the doctor, do you want the doctor to treat your symptoms or do you want the doctor to give you treatment for the disease that is causing the symptoms? If you’re like most people, the answer will be “I want the doctor to treat the disease.” In my line of work,…
What is a spamtrap?
10 February 2020
One of the issues that I get to deal with in policy enforcement is handling complaints about customers sending messages to “spamtraps.” This invariably leads to a discussion about what, exactly, is a spamtrap? There are a lot of different answers out there. For instance, a 2019 blog post at Validity asserts that it is…
Mental Health on Teams
6 February 2020
Did you know that “burnout” is coming to the ICD-11 (due to be released in June 2022)? It’s true. Burnout will be recognized as an occupational syndrome resulting from work-related stress. Burn-out is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterized by three dimensions: feelings…
Enforcement is therapeutic
3 February 2020
Policies exist for a reason. For instance, most email service providers have a policy forbidding the use of non-opt-in lists. Those policies exist because of statements like this one: Microsoft prohibits the use of the service in any manner associated with the transmission, distribution, or delivery of any unsolicited bulk or unsolicited commercial e-mail (“spam”). You…
Laws Still Apply to Bad Ideas
30 January 2020
On Monday, I posted that “Forcing Consent Is A Bad Idea”. The point was to tell say that, regardless of legal issues, there are very practical reasons in favor of setting a policy of not trying to force consent. But, just because there are practical reasons for not forcing consent does not mean that there…
Forcing Consent Is A Bad Idea
27 January 2020
We previously asked the question “who is your program for?” The idea behind that post was to briefly examine the idea that we make decisions for our programs that are based upon whom we have in mind to benefit. One example that I mentioned to show an incorrect focus was “We’ll require someone to register…
Oklahoma does … something?
23 January 2020
On January 13, Rep. Collin Walke (D-Oklahoma City) filed the Oklahoma E-Mail Communication Content Privacy Protection Act. This bill is intended to “make it illegal for companies, like Google or Microsoft, that host email servers to glean information from users” (Facebook post, 14 January 2020). The bill itself is pretty short. There is a general…