By silicon.com, 5 January 2005 16:25
eBay today announced plans to move its users within a 'gated community' for email - to protect all their correspondence from the lurking nasties of phishing, scams and spam that await in the real world.
It's an understandable move and a responsible one in the large part by a company which has clearly grown tired of its users and its brand being abused by phishing scams.
But it paves the way for more of the same - the end product of which may be a total deconstruction of the very notion of email and how it should work. The irony of the gated 'community' is that there are few words less appropriate to describe the dissolution of freedom to roam and interact.
The idea of the gated community is not uncommon. It's often the move that many take in a society when they have enough money to ensure their own personal safety and disavow the problems affecting others. It perpetuates the rich-poor divide and creates a starkly polarised society.
Issues such as phishing and spam have pushed many to consider such measures with regards to their email. Like city workers buying into gated communities in the East End, their strategy will do little for the community outside or the problems it faces... but that's not their concern. Their presence makes life tougher for those outside, as will be the case with email. Those outside the gated communities will be attacked by the scammers in increasingly brutal and sophisticated ways as the scammers target their diminishing audience.
There is no real criticism here of those who decide to cut themselves off - any chance to escape the deluge of unwanted emails is surely tempting and many have grown tired of the idea that such ills will one day be cured.
The problems don't stop with the perpetuation of problems such as phishing or spam though - and life within the gated community will not all be rosy.
A tool to streamline and consolidate communication into an ordered, foldered desktop environment will no longer be a relevant way to consider email. More log-ins, more 'email' accounts, more opportunities for accounts to go unread for a while, messages to go unanswered and important information to get 'lost in the post'.
Without the likes of Visa we would soon tire of needing a different credit card for each and every shop we visit, or different currencies for every pub we drink in. After a while it would either make us limit our behaviour and become insular and unidirectional or it would drive us insane with the unnecessary complexity of it all.
The same is probably true of email. If you think one account is bad - try having 10, 20 or 30. It simply won't be practical.
Comments
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1. David Fletcher
I really don't see the point of what ebay is doing either.
My own arrangement is to have a mailbox on my NTL account specifically for use with ebay, registered with ebay and nobody else. Then set up kmail to collect and put all email from that box into a folder called "ebay messages".
It works, it's convenient and because I don't give the address out to anybody else it doesn't get spammed.
2. Martin Hall
I lead the INBOX event and just blogged a similar response (http://goldengroup.typepad.com/inbox). The other comment here is that it's a sad reflection of lack of consistent progress by the industry to address the problem. Can't blame eBay for taking steps but hopefully this isn't the long term solution.
3. Susan Johnson
"because I don't give the address out to anybody else it doesn't get spammed."
Unfortunately if you have your own domain, you don't have to give our your e-mail address to get spammed. Spammers use automated software to mail to every possible permutation of names at a given domain.
Also, one individual found that her own ISP was actually selling her e-mail addresses to "marketers". She discovered this because, although she never used the ISP's e-mail address, just used our domain e-mail, after some months she checked her ISP e-mail account and found hundreds of spam messages.
I can see the attraction of the gated email community, but for now, until there are better solutions, I use filters on the server and on my e-mail software, which help to reduce the volumes of spam actually getting into my mailbox.
Susan
4. Anders Andersson
"Those outside the gated communities will be attacked by the scammers in increasingly brutal and sophisticated ways as the scammers target their diminishing audience."
Indeed. It doesn't take a lot to create such a gated community, though. Remove your e-mail address from public view, and there will be one address less to share the burden of the same amount of abuse. Even a simple, voluntarily enforced do-not-call list has the effect of punishing everybody who isn't on it (if it works at all).
There is a difference between a community where you protect yourself from everybody else, and one where those inside the fence can talk to each other as before (merely uninterrupted by the outsiders). In the real world, the former is the only one possible, but on the Internet we have the opportunity to create arbitrarily large communities setting their own rules, including one that might encompass a majority of Internet users. When those outside the fence are effectively cut off from large portions of society, we reverse the notions of "outside" and "inside" and call the concept a "prison". On the Internet, this is what blacklists are about.
I prefer not to hide my address (real as well as e-mail) from friends and foes alike, but I selectively try to make myself unreachable to those who in my opinion have no valid reason to contact me, and I want to cooperate with others doing the same thing.
The ability to contact you is more important to your friends than to your foes. Therefore, taking that ability away from both will punish your friends more than it will punish your foes. That's not the message I want to broadcast in response to network abuse and fraud.