Legislation needed to stem tide of junk faxes
I read with interest the letter headlined, 'Assumption' (South China Morning Post, June 26) concerning Wharf Cable's attitude towards its customers and how, by default, the company abrogated its clients' right to privacy.
I wholeheartedly agree with Francis Tse Sai-cheong's comments.
However, Mr Tse might like to know that Hongkong Telecom (HKT) also takes a cavalier line with its customers by telling them that it must protect the 'privacy and rights of the sender' when one complains about receiving unsolicited faxes.
Surely facsimile transmission recipients have some rights as well.
Incidentally, the problem has become so acute that around 90 per cent of faxes received by some offices in town can fall into the rubbish category, especially after the weekend.
Most people who grind their teeth at the intrusion of junk faxes into their lives cannot afford to 'vote with their feet' and discontinue HKT's services, simply because sophisticated electronic alternatives can be too expensive for the small businessman.
Such subscribers are not around to disable their faxes at off-peak periods, which is when the junk fax perpetrators mainly wreak their havoc.
Apart from the material cost, if the 'junkies' run a machine out of paper, then the business may lose a valuable contact or even a substantive order because of such selfish misuse of land-lines.
The solution might be for thoroughly disenchanted subscribers to cancel their dedicated fax-line (thus negating its public listing) and arrange to receive communications by normal phone line.
This would have the dual effect of saving the subscriber money while at the same time cutting into HKT's vast profits. By virtue of the latter, the message surely would not be lost upon them.
Alternatives, in the form of companies which guarantee untrammeled document delivery anywhere in the world, are available.
But firms like this normally need a minimum volume of traffic to justify taking on a new account.
So small companies in Hong Kong have little recourse when faced with intransigent complacency by heavyweights like HKT.
However, every dog has its day and HKT should be more than a little worried by the challenge of deregulation.
All those upstart foreign competitors with their new ideas and freshness of approach seem to be giving the former monopoly a run for its money.
The answer to the junk fax problem lies in legislation.
If the people at the Office of the Telecommunications Authority (OFTA) believe they are doing a good enough job to justify their salaries, then let them go a little further by proposing a new statutory rule, that is, identification of a facsimile transmission by the mandatory imprinting of a return phone and fax number on all pages sent.
Naturally, the fax recipient would have to write to this address begging them not to send any more advertising garbage by wire.
Many virtuous purveyors of electronic wastepaper gratuitously ask their target to phone them in order to cancel their 'service' if 'you really do not wish to receive communications of this kind'.
No we certainly do not, but neither do we have the time to phone them all either.
Really cunning little devils, aren't they? What we are subject to now on a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week basis, is nothing short of a 'poison pen' letter.
IAN WATSON Central
