The Battle Against Junk Mail and Spyware on the Web
By Brent Staples

Americans are smitten by the idea that new technologies will revolutionize life as we know it and greatly expand human potential. This was true of the inventor Thomas Edison, who predicted in the 1920's that the motion picture camera would transform public schooling and might even replace textbooks. An early broadcasting executive, Margaret Cuthbert, made a similar leap when she envisioned radio as "a great national headquarters for women," which would elevate housewives everywhere through high-minded programming like lectures and university courses. Instead of edifying housewives, however, radio gave them long-running melodramas that were dubbed soap operas because they entertained while selling laundry detergent.

The story of technology is the story of noble aspirations overtaken by a hard-core huckster reality. This process is on vivid display in the debate about electronic junk mail, which makes up more than half of all the e-mail that travels on the Internet. The communications breakthrough that was supposed to link people and information in revolutionary new ways is turning into a forum for digital detritus that pushes Viagra, pornography and penile enhancements.

The spam law that Congress recently enacted will have little impact on this blight. The law makes it easier to know who is sending the spam because it requires the senders to furnish return addresses and other information. But it also guts stronger state statutes, which would have given spammers more incentive to knock it off. The new measure will have little impact on spammers based abroad. Those of us who receive, say, 50 junk e-mail messages a day should consider it a victory if the new law keeps that number constant. We should be ecstatic if the number of unwanted messages goes down, even a little bit.

The new spam law does nothing about the invisible programs that invade our computers as we move from one Web site to the next. These insidious programs -- variously known as adware, spyware and snoopware -- can cause computers to call up aggressive ads or can actually track a user's movements through the Internet for use by marketers later on. The most sinister programs can record everything the user does, whether offline or surfing the Net.

Internet advertisers realize that ads work differently in the virtual world than in the real one. Ads that are noticed while sitting passively at the edge of a story in a magazine seem to have an impact in cyberspace only when they barge into the user's view by popping up from out of nowhere and jumping around.

The most aggressive advertisers have considered the sheer number of eyeballs tuned to the Internet and concluded that offending a vast majority of the audience is a small price to pay for getting access to the pornography enthusiast's wallet or attracting new customers for diet pills. This strategy works well for individual businesses, but it has clearly created a backlash against intrusive advertising on the Net.

This situation resembles the one foreseen by the futurist and science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick, who died in 1982. He depicted a world devoid of vacant space, where every conceivable surface is plastered with advertising. In that world, commercials are no longer confined to television; they have evolved into free-flying robotic pests that hypnotize consumers into buying that new car and smoking the hot new brand of cigarettes.

Philip Dick's characters keep fly swatters handy -- the idea is to get the commercial before it gets them. They close their windows at night to keep night-crawling ads from perching on their pillows and seducing them while they sleep.

The big Internet service providers fear those closed windows most of all. They already spend millions of dollars each month killing off the most odious junk mail before it reaches our mailboxes. They understand that keeping users online and happy will require a vastly improved fly swatter: a technical fix that allows people to screen out more junk mail and to protect themselves from covert programs that shadow them on the Net.

At least for the moment, a medium that was hailed as the ultimate venue for education and self-improvement is mired in the age-old conflict between the salesman who wants his foot in the door, no matter what, and the angry person who wants nothing more than to be left alone.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company The New York Times January 3, 2004, Saturday, Late Edition - Final, BYLINE: By BRENT STAPLES