Canadian Spam Levels - Up? Down? You Be the Judge

spamfighter writes "Survey firm Ipsos-Reid has taken the interesting stance that spam to Canadians has been attenuated by 20% because of the federal privacy law PIPEDA which is so fearsome in nature that is scares off even the biggest- baddest spammers in other countries. CAUCE Canada has their doubts."

Comments

Story of Deep Well

[fembots]

While numbers can be deceiving, I do believe tougher law will prevent crimes.

I remember reading a Chinese story about an emperor visiting a village with a very deep well. He asked one of the villagers if anyone had fallen into the well. The answer was no, because the well is so deep and everybody knows that, so no one has ever been careless enough to fall into it.

And back to the reality, one of the games that I'm involved in has recently introduced a "crime in the city" feature, and many players have been attacked as a result. However, as soon as the first criminal was arrested and mourned about the harsh punishment of being caught (lost points, jail time and whatnot), crime rate drops almost instantly.

Having said all these, sometimes I think the law is not tough enough because we do not yet know how to effectively identify and prosecute the offenders.

By the way, the easter egg that I mentioned here few weeks ago still has not been discovered...

Re:Story of Deep Well

[mattkime]

While numbers can be deceiving, I do believe tougher law will prevent crimes.

Case in point: The War on Drugs

Re:Story of Deep Well

[Drishmung]

sometimes I think the law is not tough enough because we do not yet know how to effectively identify and prosecute the offenders

The law is tough, and becoming tougher, because we do not yet know how to effectively identify and prosecute the offenders.

Spammers (as a generalisation), do it for financial reward. Negative reward is applied in the form of laws against spam. However, the chance of being caught is so low, that this is no real disincentive. Thus, in order to make it not worthwhile to spam, we have to either

1. Raise the probability of being caught and punished
2. Apply higher penalties

Eventually, a rational spammer will decide that penalty×prob_penalty_being_applied > profit, and will give up.

Since prob_penalty_being_applied is currently so low, the tempation is to make penalty very high.

But that has its own risks. Remember, you might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb. Draconian penalties usually result in offenders who 'shoot back'. A spammer facing 25 years as a guest of the authorities, might just be willing to take fairly extreme methods to avoid prosecution.

Canadians celebrated today

[Anonymous Coward]

As news reached their frozen ears that for the first time, someone somewhere was afraid of something Canadian. "Eh?" said one Canadian.

law and filters

[dirvish]

They also contribute the decrease to an increased use of spam filters by individuals and businesses: "New privacy laws and the use of spam filters by individuals and Internet providers helped lower the amount of unsolicited e-mail to 49 per cent of all electronic mail, down from 68 per cent in 2003." So, there might be just as much spam being sent...Canadians just aren't seeing as much because they are using filters.

... no, try again.

[meisenst]

Speaking solely as a Canadian citizen, I get more spam today than I ever have in the past. This has nothing to do with the propagation (or lack thereof) of any law, but more the fact that my email address (or one of my email addresses, many of which forward) has been out on the Internet in lists and such for years now.

While the lists propagate, so will the spam. One of these days, whatever list(s) I am on may stop circulating, but I'm not holding my breath.

Dear Parent...

[yuriismaster]

I have found a grammatical error in your not-so-excellent post.

Not a chance.

[DaCool42]

I work in the IT field for a large Canadian company. The amount of spam we get is slowly but steady increasing. Currently somewhere around 98% of all the mail we get is "Junk" (spam, invalid recipients, improper smtp protocol, etc). Looking at our mail server graphs shows a definite upward trend in both overall "Junk" and confirmed spam.

Exchange Rates

[Anonymous Coward]

A free iPod in the US is actually $15.43 in Canada at the current exchange rate.

Unlikely

[Dachannien]

Considering that Canadians, like anybody else, can have e-mail addresses that don't end in .ca, there's no way for spammers to know that they're not spamming Canadians. If Canadian laws were having an impact on spam, it would seem that the rest of us would experience a decrease in spam as well.

Canadian University blocked AOL

[adachan]

I am an American living in Canada and I need to deal with some US ISPs. For example, my father uses AOL for email. I use Shaw -- I am not sure there actually is another cable service provider in Canada -- and when I first moved here I was unable to send or recieve email from or to my father.

I later found out that some of my Japanese friends that use AOL accounts couldnt get my email and I couldnt get theirs.

This has since changed, and I can now get email from them and they can recieve mine. I found this to be really annoying at the time, but I did get much less spam on my canadian email accounts than on my US accounts.

A final note is that there is a difference between the amount of spam I get on University accounts in the US and Canada. I have 3 accounts at US univeristies and 1 in Canada. The accounts in the US get more than 50 spams a day. The Canadian one has never even recieved 1!!! This seems impressive, however, I think that someone is just stealing the outlook domain listings at US universities and selling them, this doesnt seem to be a problem yet here. Either that or they have the best spam filter I have ever seen. Cant figure it out.

Like spammers know who they're targetting

[Xugumad]

I have an e-mail address that ends in .ac.uk (UK academic), and still most of my spam is for offers that only apply to the US (pills from Canadian pharmacies being the most popular at the moment, it seems). That, and a lot of offers of a degree, which I really wouldn't expect if these were targetted (nearly everyone with a .ac.uk address either has a degree, or is working on getting a real degree).

As such, I find it very hard to believe they're avoiding spamming Canadians.