Re: [Shutup] [ietf-smtp] Proposed Charter for the "SMTP Headers Unhealthy To User Privacy" WG (fwd)

[Ted Lemon <[e-mail]>]

Thursday, Dec 3, 2015 3:13 PM Chris Lewis wrote:
> In fact, very few people have been killed by buses.

The reason very few people are killed by buses, to the extent that this is even true, is not _just_ that people have learned to look out for cross traffic, although they certainly have.   It's that there is a whole system of traffic laws that try to make sure that the bus and the person who would be killed by it do not occupy the same space at the same time.   There are sometimes stringent, sometimes lax, but very real licensing requirements to operate a bus, and if you are hired to operate a bus, and turn out to be a dangerous driver, you will probably lose your job.   In addition, there are rigorous inspection requirements in most localities (and where there aren't, bus fatalities are not coincidentally higher).

I think your analogy is a good one, but I don't think the conclusion you drew from it made any sense, because you only accounted for the behavior that people engage in to avoid being hit by buses, and that behavior is probably less than half of the protection that's in place to keep them from getting hit.   Nobody is perfectly attentive.   You need a belt-and-suspenders system of defense if you are going to avoid accidents.

The same is true of email, and that's why we're having this conversation!


--
Sent from Whiteout Mail - https://whiteout.io

My PGP key: https://keys.whiteout.io/[e-mail]