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Spamming has become a major issue these days. There is hardly an Internet or computer user who has not experienced spam in his or her e-mail at home and work. Every year trillions of spam messages are sent online and create havoc for internet service providers and consumers around the world.
The costs to service providers are enormous as they have to expand their bandwidths unnecessarily which adds to their costs, and consumers suffer because spammers waste enormous time and energy, and invade consumer privacy by attempting to steal their private data such as passwords, legal names, addresses, financial/Bank account information, social security numbers and so on.
Spammers can also surreptitiously mimic a person’s e-mail identity and start sending e-mails on user’s behalf. These and other gimmicks make spamming a vital and urgent issue to tackle on a global scale.
According to CISCO, an information technology giant, the leading countries of origin for spamming are Brazil, US, India and South Korea. While computer penetration is almost ubiquitous in US and South Korea, it is still in its infancy in India and Brazil.
In terms of ratio of the number of spam messages to the number of computer users, India is the leading origin of spam. The dilemma behind the desire to control spamming and the freedom of internet is that spamming is global in nature, but the laws, protocols and prosecutions to control spamming are national or regional in nature.
India might have different laws and regulations compared to US or Brazil to control spamming. Privacy laws might be different in their rigor and sweep depending upon country to country and continent to continent.
United States, which was founded on individual liberty, private property and pursuit of happiness, has strong constitutional guarantees protecting privacy against government search and seizure. However, the electronic nature of spam makes it difficult to contain spammers’ attempt to search and seize other online users’ identity and private data making it a grave threat.
