Posts tagged as "spam"

Unsolicited But Targeted Email That Fails In So Many Ways

Like most people, my email Inbox gets hit with a lot of spam on a daily basis. Most of this is caught by my email client's junk mail filtering, but some gets through. Most of it is, at face value, auto generated; phishing attempts for bank accounts I don't have or solicitations for advance fee fraud.

SPAM

But there's also been a recent spike in people wanting me to embed infographics or links into one of my sites that the sender thinks my readers might like. Most of these are so off target as to be ignored, but sometimes there's a mail that seems to have come from a human and might even be relevant to what I write about, but that just fails on so many levels. This is one such email, redacted to save the originating sender and company from any embarrassment.

It's Time to Stop LAMB (Location Based SPAM) Before It Even Exists

We all suffer from SPAM, the unwanted and unsolicited commercial bulk emails that are the reason we have Junk Mail filters and folders in our email clients and servers. A quick glance at the Junk folder for my personal email account shows over 300 of these since the beginning of February alone. If you use some form of instant messenger, be it MSN, Yahoo!, ICQ, AOL or any of the others on the market, you've probably come across SPIM, Instant Messaging SPAM. Then there's also mobile phone SPAM via text messages, comment SPAM, the list goes on and on.

We're poised to start seeing a new form of SPAM raise its ugly head. Let's call it LAMB for now, Location Based Advertising SPAM.

As Ed Parsons pointed out on his blog yesterday, Apple are banning location based advertising in apps. "If you build your application with features based on a user’s location, make sure these features provide beneficial information. If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user’s location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store."

This is a good first step in locking down potential abuses of a technology before it has a chance to get out of control. The reason we have SPAM and all the other variants in the first place is that the underlying technologies were designed in an open manner with no control mechanisms in place to thwart unsolicited and unwanted messages and content. But we need to go further than this.