Australia Looking To Outlaw Spyware

from the spammers-getting-worse dept

Over in Australia, they've realized that as they try to slow down the spam tide, the worst spam scammers have moved from spam on to spyware. Thus, they're now talking about outlawing spyware - at which point the scammers will move on to something else. While I do think something needs to be done about spyware, I wonder how they're going to define spyware. Whenever politicians start outlawing technologies, there's a big risk that they'll do such a bad job of defining the software, that plenty of legitimate applications get banned as well. In the case of spyware, I guess the focus should be on applications that are installed without the computer owner's clear consent (which means not sneaking approval into an end user license agreement either).

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