The Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland has released the 2004 Technology Readiness Survey. The headline they’ve chose for it is National Survey Finds 22.9 Million Hours a Week Wasted on Spam.
The headline should be National Survey Finds How Badly You Can Mess Things Up By Asking Consumers To Self-Report Online Behavior.
The methodology was to ask 1000 people various questions, including how many spam e-mails they receive and how much time they spend deleting e-mails. The average person reports receiving 18.5 e-mails, and the average person reports spending 2.8 minutes in a typical day deleting spam.
Now do the math.
According to this survey, the average person spends 9.08 seconds deleting each spam they receive.
Try looking at a spam e-mail for nine seconds. You can’t do it. You know it’s spam in the first second – the first two if you’re slow. You can delete it in another second – another two if you’re slow.
My guess – just a guess, not the product of expensive, useless survey research – is that they have overestimated the impact and cost of spam by at least 100%.
Until they come up with a more reliable survey method, we know nothing more about the cost of spam than we did before this survey was done.
Brian Cooley of ZD Net had a very entertaining essay on Spam yesterday that is must-reading. I agree with every word of it and absolutely love the line about the grandmas on AOL and people in John Mellencamp videos. Click here (and scroll down a bit).
A couple of days ago, the Post had an article detailing the strategy shift that politicians are using to “reach out” to voters. Rather than the old, and very expensive, method of sending voters junk mail, politicians are now buying very detailed e-mail lists in order to spam registered voters in targeted ways. This trend should be of no surprise to anyone. When CAN SPAM passed last year, it only “banned” commercial e-mail. Apparently, political messages are so vital that spamming voters with them is ok.
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I hate to be the one to break it to you, but your “brilliant” idea to eliminate spam will not work. And before you waste my time with details, please take a moment to run a sanity check by filling out this checklist.
There’s a very interesting article over at ZDNet about the unintended benefits of the continuing spam wars. The author makes the point that the war between spammers and filter designers has sparked new interest and innovation in the field of AI (artificial intelligence). In order to distinguish between spam and legitimate e-mail, filters must become increasingly “intelligent” as spammers continually find new ways to slip by them. The ongoing adaptation of these machines may one day make them sophisticated enough to pass a Turing test, where a human interviewer blindly interviews two subjects (one human, one computer) and is unable to tell the difference between the two. As the author concludes, “If the evil of spam leads to a renaissance of well-funded research into fundamental knowledge systems–nothing else will do–it could be the final kick we need to create truly intelligent machines.”
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The BBC reports on a new effort by ISPs in Great Britain to rid their networks of spam: pull the plug on the sites using spam to advertise, or “spamvertise”. Though this policy may result in some collateral damage and is unlikely to stop spam from sites outside of the UK, it shows that private, self-help measures are possible and may prove to be quite effective. If successful, it will be interesting to see if ISPs in other countries follow suit.
Via /.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.