Latest TODAY column is: Unwanted Business Spam
Excerpt:
Singapore is planning to introduce an anti-spam law to supposedly help us fight [spam]. Hurray!
But before you celebrate, know this: The proposed law will let a business keep sending unsolicited email messages to a person until he tells them to stop. Never mind that spam costs us millions of dollars in lost productivity each year. It is up to you to tell them you want out, because, God forbid, we do not want to stifle e-commerce.
As Mr Charles Lim, principal senior state counsel in the Attorney-General's chambers, points out, we need to balance the need of local businesses to publicise themselves with the wish of computer users who do not want to be bugged by unwanted unsolicited mass-marketing email.
My response to this is -- how do I put it in the best non-computer jargon -- bollocks.
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Full column:
Unwanted Business Spam
For years, they told us, the 2 megabytes (MB) or 6 MB space in your free email account with the annoying ads was enough. You want more megabytes, you have to pay us some megadollars. So we diligently deleted emails, cursing friends who sent us images that were big enough to print an election banner with, thereby clogging our mailboxes.
Then on the seventh day, Google said, let there be a Gigabyte! Our free email service will give you 1 Gigabyte of space. Yes! You heard me, 1 Gigabyte of space! For those of you who are not computer savvy, let me put it into layman's terms for you: it is a lot of bytes. Bytes coming out of your ears. Not just mega, but giga. More bytes than your emails will take up in a lifetime, unless you are the sort of person who regularly receives poster-quality images. Or porn.
All of a sudden, our free Hotmail and Yahoo accounts became 250 MB and 100 MB of space. Wow, thank you very much. It was not a lot of bytes, but it was quite a bit of bytes. Amazing what a little competition will do. And I did not even have to do a thing to earn it. All I had to do was be a potential eyeball for ads.
I think we all take email a little for granted, and only notice it when it is down. Or when spam, or unsolicited email, swamps us.
Singapore is planning to introduce an anti-spam law to supposedly help us fight this. Hurray!
But before you celebrate, know this: The proposed law will let a business keep sending unsolicited email messages to a person until he tells them to stop. Never mind that spam costs us millions of dollars in lost productivity each year. It is up to you to tell them you want out, because, God forbid, we do not want to stifle e-commerce.
As Mr Charles Lim, principal senior state counsel in the Attorney-General's chambers, points out, we need to balance the need of local businesses to publicise themselves with the wish of computer users who do not want to be bugged by unwanted unsolicited mass-marketing email.
My response to this is — how do I put it in the best non-computer jargon — bollocks.
Come now, if a local business wants to publicise itself, go right ahead. But not at the expense of my time and my privacy. If you want to promote your company, spend some bloody money and do it the proper way, like asking for permission from your customers.
It is so easy to dismiss spam as a small price to pay for not stifling e-commerce, isn't it? Here, how about this idea? We allow local businesses to keep calling mobile phone users to publicise themselves, until the mobile phone users tell them to stop. After all, we do not want to stifle telemarketing.
At 10 to 20 cents per minute per incoming call, it does not look so insignificant a cost to the user any more, does it? I am already dealing with insurance companies and banks calling me on my mobile phone -- at my own cost -- to sell me things I do not want or need. I even got one call from an insurance company offering me a career. When I said, no, proceeded to ask me if I wanted any policies! Now you tell me I have to deal with this nonsense when I read my email too?
But… but… but… email is free, you say. Look, YOU try deleting unwanted email every day from your mailbox, and tell me if your time is free. YOU then try to follow up with another email — on the basis of the proposed anti-spam law here — to each and every one of these loser Singapore companies who sent you their unwanted emails to tell them to stop. Tell me after doing that for a week, if email costs you nothing.
And besides the cost of spending time deleting spam, there are other costs. I get my email on the road, either via my mobile phone or PDA. Sometimes, when overseas, I have to dial in via a pokey dial-up phone line with the connection quality of rotting cabbage. Every byte literally costs me money. Money that I am not prepared to pay for some cheapskate business to send me email I did not ask for.
There used to be this clown in my company, who would send out jokes to everyone else in the company. I think all of us have a few of these guys in our work place, who think they are the God’s gifts to Internet humour. Jokes were one thing, but 5MB movie files of a constipated elephant taking a dump on an unsuspecting tourist is not funny. Not over a dodgy telephone line in a foreign hotel charging by the minute.
It is not like we can turn off our email accounts the way we can lock our letterboxes -- the new ones which only allow a postman with a special key to put stuff in our box -- from junk mail. Email is on, all day, or we might miss something important. Like the wife asking you to remeMBer to buy the diapers and the baby anti-butt-rash cream.
I wonder if we, the users, will be allowed to keep sending a business or government organization emails until they tell us to stop. That would be fun, wouldn’t it? All 800,000 of us, each sending an email to the CEO of that aspiring e-commerce local company who sent us their spam, until he got his admin to send out 800,000 emails to tell us to stop.
Oh, but that would be wrong, say the authorities, because the CEO will not be able to read his email because his mailbox would be flooded, then his ability to conduct his business or read the soccer results while pretending to be busy would be stifled.
Right. You have been warned.
mr brown is the accidental author of a popular website that has been documenting the dysfunctional side of Singapore life since 1997. He does not want any insurance policies or careers, any “free plane tickets” or timeshare holidays, nor does he have any credit card debt to balance transfer. So stop calling his mobile phone or there will be bloodshed.
