Legco on tiptoes as Canberra puts boot into spam

One of the biggest problems in the battle against spam is persuading the authorities that it is a problem. In the Legislative Council on Wednesday, Henry Tang Ying-yen, Secretary for Commerce, Industry and Technology continued what is becoming an annual tradition in government, by tiptoeing around the question of spam.

The question was raised by Sin Chung-kai, who represents the information technology functional constituency. Mr Sin noted an Australian government report that found spam caused losses in production and bandwidth, and could lead to crime.

'Australians are heartily sick of spam e-mails touting black market drugs, celebrity porn, bogus prizes, Nigerian money laundering and other false and/or fraudulent material. Spam is clogging the arteries of the Internet, polluting the medium with pornography and scams and stealing bandwidth from ordinary Australians,' said the report, from the National Office for the Information Economy.

These Aussie politicians do not mess around.

Pointing out that Australia and Britain were planning anti-spam legislation, Mr Sin asked whether our government had carried out a similar study. He also asked about a couple of reviews the government had been promising since last year: the Office of the Telecommunications Authority's Guidelines for Senders of Fax Advertisements and the completely toothless spam policy drawn up by the Hong Kong Internet Service Providers Association (HKISPA) and the Privacy Commissioner. The reviews were meant to decide whether we need laws against spam and junk faxes. Mr Tang's answer was predictably woolly.

'Although we have not carried out a detailed study similar to that conducted in Australia, we have been monitoring the local situation regarding junk fax and e-mail spamming in Hong Kong,' Mr Tang wrote.