Facebook is coming under scrutiny (again!), this time about their email scanning policies.
Most of you are probably in the email security industry and are well aware that any email security solution will scan a message to divert or block spam, phishing, etc. However, Facebook is now taking it a step further and actually blocking or censoring messages by not only blocking links to torrents published publicly on member profile pages, but also examining private messages that contain them and blocking them as well.
As reported in Wired1,
‘It’s not clear, however, how links to torrents are spammy, harassing or illegal. Torrents themselves are not copyright-infringing, nor would Facebook be liable for their users’ communications under federal law even if the files were infringing.’
Now suppose your email security vendor started blocking what they thought was potentially harmful to your customers beyond spam, virus and phishing content- what would you do? Where does the line get drawn?
References:
1. http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/05/facebooks-e-mail-censorship-is-legally-dubious-experts-say
But Sandy, isn’t that what email security vendors already do? Vendors have been trusted with determining what is harmful to end-users.