Gmail Users 'Hard Pass' On Plan To Let Political Emails Bypass Spam Filters (arstechnica.com) 62
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Earlier this month, Google sent a request (PDF) to the Federal Election Commission seeking an advisory opinion on the potential launch of a pilot program that would allow political committees to bypass spam filters and instead deliver political emails to the primary inboxes of Gmail users. During a public commenting period that's still ongoing, most people commenting have expressed staunch opposition for various reasons that they're hoping the FEC will consider. "Hard pass," wrote a commenter called Katie H. "Please do not allow Google to open up Pandora's Box on the people by allowing campaign/political emails to bypass spam filters."
Out of 48 comments submitted (PDF) as of July 11, only two commenters voiced support for Google's pilot program, which seeks to deliver more unsolicited political emails to Gmail users instead of marking them as spam. The rest of the commenters opposed the program, raising a range of concerns, including the potential for the policy to degrade user experience, introduce security risks, and even possibly unfairly influence future elections. Business Insider reported that the period for public commenting ends on Saturday, July 16, which is longer than what was shared in conflicting reports that said the initial deadline to comment was July 11. That means there's still time for more Gmail users and interested parties to chime in. "For some opposing commenters, it's about rejecting unnecessary strains on the Gmail user experience," adds Ars. "In short: People don't want emails coming to their inbox that they did not sign up for."
"Other commenters were more concerned over a perceived government overreach." There were also commenters that said the move could introduce security risks, influence elections, and make Gmail more vulnerable to "emotionally charged" messaging that they never signed up for.
Out of 48 comments submitted (PDF) as of July 11, only two commenters voiced support for Google's pilot program, which seeks to deliver more unsolicited political emails to Gmail users instead of marking them as spam. The rest of the commenters opposed the program, raising a range of concerns, including the potential for the policy to degrade user experience, introduce security risks, and even possibly unfairly influence future elections. Business Insider reported that the period for public commenting ends on Saturday, July 16, which is longer than what was shared in conflicting reports that said the initial deadline to comment was July 11. That means there's still time for more Gmail users and interested parties to chime in. "For some opposing commenters, it's about rejecting unnecessary strains on the Gmail user experience," adds Ars. "In short: People don't want emails coming to their inbox that they did not sign up for."
"Other commenters were more concerned over a perceived government overreach." There were also commenters that said the move could introduce security risks, influence elections, and make Gmail more vulnerable to "emotionally charged" messaging that they never signed up for.
I'm curious (Score:5, Insightful)
to know of any gmail user that actually wants to receive political spam in their inbox. Like even if there was just one person, that would be amazing.
Re: I'm curious (Score:2)
Not a single one. I'm betting those two comments in support of this change are politicians. They waste time and money spamming our inboxes and postal mail and so very little of their petty advertising they send out gets further than the trash bin.
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I have 0 interest from any political emails, whether they're from the person I'm voting for or not. I only have to look EVERYPLACE ELSE for political data during an election season.
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Technically they're emails are incorrectly being marked as spam, likely being flagged as scams since the emails themselves are asking for donations. However, mostly just the republican emails are, which is what sparked all of this. That is what the FEC complaint about it. It's asking for google to explain why there is such a huge discrepancy with blocked emails, and what they plan to do about it. Obviously there is a suspicion of bias and google does not want that image. They've been through those accusatio
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To hell with that. I don't want ANY political spam, republican OR democratic, whether I would vote for the political or not. If republicans are getting spam filtered more often, that just means they should be filtering democrats more, not republicans less.
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For all I know it could be that the republican's email tactics are more annoying and gmail's spam ranking algorithms picked up on it for reasons that had nothing to do with politics.
Remember, the only evil bit emails have is authentication based. Any AI that could scan for intent is a) invasive of content, with privacy implications and b) vulnerable to externally imposed bias
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If Republican spam gets filtered more often than Democrat spam, all it means is that Democrat spam isn't filtered well enough.
I don't need any spam from moochers.
Re:I'm curious (Score:4, Insightful)
Technically they're emails are incorrectly being marked as spam
(boggle)
How is this not spam?
Spam is "unsolicited messages sent in bulk": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
By any measure at all, these messages are correctly being marked as spam.
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Ah, but you see by USA governmental definition, the political messages are not spam. This is what happens when you give the government the right to make definitions — the usual self-serving bullshit.
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Hilariously, it's in the CAN-SPAM act. I doubt I could have made that one up if I tried, but I didn't have to.
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GDPR wise it would depend how they got your email address. If you save it to them freely on the understanding that it would be used to spam you, then okay. But very likely they bought the address from a company that you didn't give permission to sell it, or gathered it for some other reason like to attend an event and didn't tick a box saying they could also use it for spam.
Some companies in the UK try to be sly. They ask for an email address, ostensibly to send you an electronic receipt and keep a copy on
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Maybe some of the spammers want it to see whether it gets through. Apart from that, my guess would be "nobody" as well.
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Sure, they'll likely be volunteers for the particular political candidate. I'm sure they'd want the spam, at least from their candidate...
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Great, mind handing out the addresses? I bet a lot of people would gladly forward them all their political begging spam if they need it that badly.
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They can sign up for the email list if they want to see stuff from their candidate.
This is spam we are talking about: UNSOLICITATED emal.
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Well at least you seem to agree with me that the gmail user should be the one to make that choice in the first place.
I really don't want Google to become complicit in political censorship no matter how it's done.
This being slashdot it should be obvious why that would be concerning.
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The converse is "I don't want Google facilitating the targeting of dishonest political ads to specific subsets of the population". At some point we need some new rules governing political speech. The old "I'm candidate X, and I approve this message" rule has become irrelevant. I think Google restricted targeted political advertising on YouTube during the last election, but I'm not sure, and who knows whether it was effective.
Political speech used to be limited by cost - hence the crazy "money is speech"
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The main problem with the spam economy is the same as the problem with government:
corruption by the rich
Credit card companies make a shitload of fees from spam purchases so the government won't dare try to stop them because of the money games holding their campaigns hostage.
That is a bigger problem than pink contracts with ISPs.
Credit card companies could stop spam cold by taking the money out of it that makes it so profitable but they won't because they're in on it
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If they enjoy it, we should be able to forward all flagged spam to their gmails.
Just sayin'.
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I think I do know this one guy. He went to an Alex Jones rally and makes donations to the Republican Party. He was once my friend, until I suggested we keep politics out of our conversation. After that, he never spoke to me again.
I think he just might actually want and read political spam.
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There's only two types of political emails (Score:2)
Ones from the party you oppose, barking up the wrong tree.
Ones from the party you support, asking for donations.
I say spambox 'em all and let God sort it out.
No one wants political emails (Score:4, Interesting)
...but, equally, I'm not comfortable with google being given carte blanche to filter political messages. So, as a compromise, how about a political tab ( in addition to social, promotions, updates, forums )? A campaign can register with google, and the messages can bypass the spam folder and be filed under the politics tab.
That way anyone who wants them can get them, but the rest of us can ignore them.
Re:No one wants political emails (Score:4, Informative)
When I flag something as spam, I don’t want a built-in override to cancel my action. To me, it’s as simple as that.
My workplace used Google Apps for Education (or whatever nom du jour they’re using now). It’s already annoying when I see messages that say “because of your organizational settings, this message was not sent to spam” on unsolicited (and pointless) email from certain business units here that mainly seem to exist for the purpose of generating such email. I really don’t want a government override added on top of that.
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That statement isn't made anywhere. How do you know that is how it will work? The complaint is over emails that you don't mark as spam, which google marks themselves.
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It's almost as if you missed the part where it's not the gmail users that are complaining, it's only the spammers.
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At the very least by explaining it, they're exposing your system administrator as the one actually making the decision, instead of Google itself.
Knowing your boss has a political bias like that could prove useful depending on how you feel about it.
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They're not filtering political messages, or more specifically, they're not filtering messages because they're political. They're simply filtering e-mail that looks like spam.
Also, since they're also a major e-mail provider, they can tell when a good chunk of their users start getting the same e-mail from the same From address that they didn't get e-mail from before, then it's likely a mass e-mail spam blast.
The f
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In my experience, Google does an excellent job of detecting spam, including political spam. I am totally comfortable with that.
SPAM is SPAM. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't care whether it is a political campaign, a political survey, a firefighters' support group, spam in Chinese, another firefighters' support group, a policemans' PAC, yet another firefighters' support group, another... you get the picture. FUCK OFF trying to get my money. It's bad enough that these groups are protected from the Do Not Call bills, but now they're going to want exemptions from SPAM-filtering too.
HARD BLOCK (Score:5, Insightful)
There are ways to reach me with your political message. Email is not one of them.
Damn it. (Score:4, Insightful)
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But the list is an alternative to loosened filters. So what would you rather have? A whitelist of accredited non-scam emails, or would you prefer loosened filters where you'd end up receiving both?
Ideally things would remain as-is to many people, i.e block republican donation requests but continue to allow democrat requests. Unfortunately this isn't sitting well with half the political spectrum since money plays a big part in winning a campaign. Keeping things as-is is a sure way to force legislation versus
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> So what would you rather have? A whitelist of
> accredited non-scam emails, or would you prefer
> loosened filters where you'd end up receiving both?
Neither. Don't loosen the filters a whit, and don't whitelist any of that garbage. Just because an email is not a scam, doesn't mean it's not spam. I don't give a goddamn if the spam is from a republican OR a democrat. I don't want ANY of that shit. And any "solution" that involves me getting more political spam from EITHER side needs to die in a
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No, if it is not blocking Democrat spam, the solution is to fix their spam detectors so that it does, without changing all the stuff it already blocks.
Of course the idea that it is not blocking Democrats is a fever dream by a mass of hysterical deluded people that are responsible for this horrible idea being considered. Hope you stay up all night thinking about what you did.
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Depends on if they do a dictionary check to look for intentional typos meant to evade the spam filter.
I actually saw this once during a script kiddie attack on IRC networks trying to joe job Libera after the whole scandal involving a hostile takeover of Freenode's domain.
Staying with my mail client (Score:4, Insightful)
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The trouble is, no desktop software spam filter comes close to the ability of GMail to accurately detect spam, and to avoid mis-identifying good email as spam. I've tried them all, and I don't want to go back to that constant tweaking of rules, and the constant checking of the spam folder to look for things it got wrong. With GMail, I can just forget about it.
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Of course, but that's not what Flexagon was suggesting. The specific suggestion was to rely on local spam filtering.
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I find the odd legitimate message, usually for one of the mailing lists I'm subscribed to, in the spam folder. Seems some email providers (Yahoo?) don't mark messages correctly if you use their SMTP to mail from their client.
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Yes, it does happen occasionally. But if you've ever used another spam filter, you know that Google's accuracy rate is far, far higher.
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Yes this is an annoying problem, quite a few messages to mailing lists (but not all of them) are being marked as Spam. It looks like company-supplied signature blocks with lots of HTML are what triggers this. Would be nice if gmail fixed this, one idea would be that if I have a filter that labels anything to that mailing list, it stops it from being marked as spam.
Only 48 comments? (Score:3)
I am not a nice man. (Score:2)
I will find out the home phone numbers and addresses of every freakin' politician responsible and start calling them up at random times of the day and night to tell them how I feel about being bothered with their ham-fisted nonsense if I start getting political spam this way.
I'm not sure which is worse... (Score:2)
... worrying that I'll be bombarded by free-flowing political spam from all* sides, or just annoyed by politcal ads that Google's team/culture agrees with and nothing else.
*At least the Democrats and Republicans... Cant have any of those dirty 3rd party candidates that want to break the cycle able to get their message out now can we?
Egalitarian carpet bombing (Score:2)
I'm willing to accept political propaganda spam to my gmail, if all Google employees and their family members receive them as well.
We'll see who caves in first.
For non-US users? (Score:2)
from do no harm to f the people (Score:1)
Precedent exists (Score:2)
Politicians are exempt from the Do Not Call registry. They are our betters, and we have to respect the law.
Who cares? (Score:2)
I get so much spam already, that it's just one more batch of stuff that will be automatically deleted at my end, regardless of what google does.
You know this is not so much a request... (Score:2)
What if... (Score:1)
Suppose we report persistent spam to the FBI for disseminating child pornography. Eye of the beholder, right? Would it cause the spammers any trouble or would we just have men with mirrored sunglasses knocking on our doors with hard questions about false reporting?