If i received such an email, I would mark it as spam and move on with my life. Why did this blogger take it seriously? Does she take other forms of spam so seriously?
I do feel for her stress and anxiety, but I also have to question her mental ability to filter noise. Life must be quite stressful for her overall.
Which even if it is completely nonsensical and has no basis in law, could cost thousands of dollars to hire a lawyer and file a response to a statement of claim.
If you have ever seen the experiences of people who have been sued by sovereign citizens/freeman-on-the-land/"this is an admiralty flag" people, it would help to better understand the context I'm viewing it in.
Recommend you don’t spend “ thousands of dollars to hire a lawyer and file a response” on something that you find very slightly worrisome.
Again, I think you, too, are being suckered into spam. Plenty of people fall for spam scams. It is nothing to be ashamed of. Think of all the people who fall for the fake IRS phone calls.
But learn from it: keep your guard up when you get emails, phone calls, or text messages from strangers.
Anything legally binding in the US will come to you via snail mail.
yes it will, but a really determined person with an axe to grind will very often make known their intentions well in advance of that.
and no, it won't always come by snail mail, DMCA notices and similar with actual legal threats will arrive regularly via SMTP.
Perhaps you've never had thousands of people torrenting movies using you as a service provider before.
Serious lawyers don't use email.
And I consider DMCA notices to fall within the category of a certain specific type of legal threat. There are also some in the queue right now that don't read like typical DMCA notices such as you might receive for downloading the mandalorian, but look more like straight out attempts at extortion (pay us right now so that we won't sue you for torrenting backdoor sluts volume XII, etc).
As to what the ultimate end user recipients consider them to be, that's up to them and their counsel.
I don’t know where you “learned” this false information, but I would recommend going to whatever authority figures are spouting this nonsense and correcting them.
That statement is false. Please don’t provide incorrect legal information in this forum.
It doesn't need to be legally binding to be worrisome. Imagine I told you "I'm going to sue you. You don't need to do anything until you get the formal notice" and you found the statement credible. Would you go on with your life as normal, or would you be stressed and hire counsel if affordable?
I call a lawyer any time I have a legal question for which I am not confident about the answer. If it’s not a real problem, a lawyer will be able to answer it a fraction of an hour’s worth of billable time.
And to those unaware that this is a possibility, disseminating this knowledge is our collective responsibility. Be part of the solution.
Except that they will probably won't know the answer immediately an need more time than that: https://twitter.com/DanielleVEsq/status/1472105731474137094
Responding to spam and then feeling like you've been the victim of some injustice that the spam didn't say "hey, I'm not really spam, I'm grad-student flavored spam" is quite a take.
Here's a tip for anyone not running a business: If your response is legally required, it'll come in the physical mail. Don't take legal advice from spam, me, or your sysadmin.
Yes. It's not hard.
Given that they were targeted here, this person has a public mail address, so it's very likely they receive similar spam. Given that and the observation that they seem to be stressed by spam, this seems like a plausible assumption.
[0] At least when we assume good faith.
Yes but you still need to be judicious and critical.
It would have gotten my response... probably an hour of my time explaining how our policies work and how, yes, we would comply with their request even if the laws don't technically protect them. There isn't really a prefilled template you can respond to questions like this (if you actually care about responding inquiries like this) so I would have genuinely spent time thinking about the questions and giving them more than a yes and no.
Seriously, just a few lines in this mail raises all sorts of flags.
> I have a few questions about your process for responding to California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) data access requests
This is the worrying part.
If the first sentence didn't already raise your suspicion, the second one definitely should, and put it over the threshold for spam/scam.