Lisa Minter quoted a newspaper article:
Many companies I deal with want me to use the 'net to access my bills or account on-line. Doing so obviously saves them money from having a real person answer my questions over the phone.
I guess I'm a Luddite, but I shy away from using e-mail or the Internet for personal business transactions. I feel there aren't enough protections -- both technical and legal -- to protect consumers.
First, often the Internet does NOT answer questions I have. Sending emails to a company is often a failure -- either they never answer or don't answer the question properly (often they refer you back to the 'net page, but if the info was there in the first place I wouldn't need to ask). Even big companies forget to update their web pages with the latest information. Other companies change terms and offerings so rapidly and make them so complex a person is needed to sort it all out.
Secondly, email is notoriously unreliable. Servers break down and messages in transit are lost. Messages are accidently deleted along with the spam. Lastly is the security problem -- emails are easily forged.
It has long been against the law to use the US Mail for fraud, and I presume there are still U.S. Postal Inspectors who investigate and prosecute violations. But does anyone really know the law as it stands with fraud done by email? Who is responsible for enforcement and prosecution? My guess is only the most blatant and biggest violators are prosecuted (and not necessarily thrown in prison as they deserve) while the vast majority go unscathed. "Spam" is not just a nuisance, it is fraud and a host of other law violations, but nothing seems to be done.
The fact that Congress can't pass an enforceable anti-spam law means to me the whole email system is just not safe. Too many legal loopholes, too little enforcement, too many criminals.
The Internet is based upon protocols never intended or designed for use in public commerce. Remember the 'net was developed as a private link between users of a very small community and designed to share information. As such, there was little need for protection since there was little to be gained by fraud. That became obsolete the minute the 'net became public. So today we have people at home hooking their PCs up to broadband networks, blissfully unaware that criminals are hacking into their PCs searching for weaknesses to exploit. The network protocols should never permit this kind of random searching in the first place.
A growing problem with using the 'net is its high powered automation. When I had my 286 DOS machine, I knew what it was doing because (normally) only I could start up a program. (Obviously if I took someone else's program I was at risk). Email attachments back then didn't automatically start up macros in applications. But today everything is so automated and fancy most users have no idea what's going on in their machine. Hard drives spin along, things open and close on their own. Things intended to be a shortcut and easy for us make it easier for saboteurs to screw up our machines.
(Shouldn't we call viruses "sabotage"? The word "virus" makes it sound like it came from mother nature, not an intentional effort to harm.)
The technocrats out there are partly to blame. They never can sit still long enough to let a software release settle in before demanding new features. This constant revisions allows bugs and fraud to creep in. Stable functionality would get sturdier over time.
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: If I understand the law correctly, if you make a false/fraudulent communication by _any_ means -- email, or web site, or telephone, etc -- in an effort to induce someone else to deposit something in the US Mail, then you have committed postal fraud. Example: you apply for a credit card using a web site or email in someone else's name and with their credentials; this in turn induces the credit card company to send you a card in the postal mail, then it is as good as if you had originally corresponded by mail, you still committed postal fraud. Or maybe at some point they send you a bill or a notice in the US mail. In other words, _they_ would not have used the US Mail had _you_ not encouraged them to do so. PAT]