Should we discuss the whole SPAM issue too?
Recent anti-spam legislation is generally being perceived as a joke. The main issue is its jurisdiction: if a spammer can't spam from within the US, he can hire some company outside to do it for him.
That aside, spam is hard to trace, when the sender is masked, so this kind of effort (TCPA) is part of the solution.
While I also value my privacy, I also need to be able to use the internet, and I need to be able to do business on it, without having to pay to cover what malicious people are doing. I don't know the percentage of that occurence, but if this security scheme is cheaper to implement than the net loss in fraudulent transactions, I fully expect it to appear, and I will support it, as long as the usage is kept for the purposes stated above.
This is the kind of debate that's really personal for some people. On one hand, we have efforts to legitimize actions that can be used to commit a crime (i.e. file sharing-music swapping), which have been deemed perfectly legitimate because there exists a legal usage for the thing, and on the other hand, we have a proposal for something that could be use legitimately, but could also be used illegitimately.
The real question here is: who's going to police this idea, who's going to safeguard our privacy? The FBI is still upgrading their 486 workstations, so I'm not counting on them.
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