No telling.

• Author: Postrel, Virginia

The push for Internet privacy controls combines a bad theory with a dangerous agenda.

Over the past week, I received about two dozen unsolicited mass e-mails, otherwise known as "spam." About half were devoted to sex, including six messages promoting a new Hustler Web site and one paradoxically promising a site "SO HOT WE CANT SHOW IT ON THE WEB." Most of the rest advertised the stuff of late-night TV commercials and dubious classified ads: "LUXURY CARS FOR UNDER $1000" from government auctions, family histories and coats of arms ("All Nationalities"), credit cards for people with lousy credit records, a psychic hotline. One offered to teach me how to become a spammer myself. The most reputable-seeming message promoted a site for golf-related classified ads.

I wasn't interested in any of them. None of the spammers had bothered to find out the most obvious facts about me - Hustler is not known for its appeal to women - much less to determine, for instance, that I have an excellent credit record and don't play golf.

Spam costs virtually nothing to send, and it bothers the people who receive it. That upsets "privacy advocates" and their friends in Congress: "No one - from the consumer to the small business[es] who run servers - should be forced to pay for unsolicited advertisements," said Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) when he announced a bill to ban spam. Smith is too easily outraged. A week's worth of junk costs me maybe a quarter, hardly the sort of expense that justifies congressional action.

The cost to Internet service providers can indeed be substantial, and suits by American Online, Earthlink, and other ISPs have already forced big-time spammers to pay large damages for violating the ISPs' terms of service. But for consumers, spam should be of no more public concern than grocery lines, Sunday drivers, or squirming children in restaurants; it is simply part of living with other people, and the solution is as close as the delete key. To demand legal action every time something annoys you is the surest way to end up living in a conflict-filled society ruled by intrusive regulation and constant litigation. Telling people to hit "delete" or let their ISP know they're being bothered won't attract TV cameras, however. For that you need a crisis and a bill.

Cyberspace is full of "crises" these days, many involving "privacy rights," and Congress is full of bills to address them, 32 by one count. What really has privacy advocates riled isn't spam but its exact opposite: targeted marketing information. Cyberspace offers people the chance to easily find others with similar interests - hence the flourishing of specialized Web sites and Usenet groups. That same efficient search, enhanced by sorting software, has commercial applications. Web sites can collect data from the people who visit them and either display individually tailored advertising or send visitors product information later. Or they may not be interested in individual information at all but in general patterns and aggregates: What is the average age of our audience? Which parts of our site are most popular? Where do our visitors come from?

The answer to the burning question, How is anyone ever going to make money on the Web?, probably lies in collecting and efficiently...