Spam

Spam

Spam is any mass sending of unsolicited electronic messages which creates annoyance, disruption, deceit, or any otherwise harm to the recipient. Email is the most commonly recognized venue of spam, but other media such as chat rooms, blogs, online forums, mobile phone messaging, wiki sites, video-hosting websites, and social networks are susceptible to spam.

The word spam is derived from Spam (uppercase), the name of the canned precooked meat product made by the Hormel Foods Corporation, which was used in a popular 1970 Monty Python sketch in which a restaurant's menu has Spam in nearly every selection and in which the script repeats the word "Spam" liberally. The consequent annoyance caused by this repetition in one character who dislikes Spam thus semantically mimics the annoyance electronic spam causes to recipients.

Overview

Due to the low cost and ease with which electronic messages can be sent, spam is one of the most ubiquitous problems in information and communication technologies. Spam is economically unique in that the receiver pays so much more than the sender does. The vast majority of spam is sent by networks of virus-infected computers, known as botnets, and therefore does not heavily cost the "sender." Statistical studies estimate that around 200 billion spam messages are sent per day and that 97% of all email messages are unwanted. Approximately 104 billion user hours per day go into reading and manually deleting spam . Spam is increasingly sophisticated, and the development of anti-spam software to combat it has created an arms race between spammers and computer-security software.

From a perspective of cost-benefit analysis, spamming occurs because of the low cost of sending mass messages versus the high potential benefit of receiving sales, marketing, or other positive effects from those messages. One study of a botnet producing pharmaceutical spam, the most frequent type of spam , estimated that 3.5 million U.S. dollars of revenue could be generated per year, with the cost of distribution being relatively low and largely involving the labor and maintenance of botnet software . Anecdotally, the mass presence of spam alone suggests it is profitable, as if it were not profitable it would likely cease to exist.

Although spamming's most recognizable form is email spam, a wide range of other mediums are also susceptible to spam. For example, instant-messaging spam, common on systems such as Skype, is prevalent, with a report from Ferris research estimating 500 million spam IMs being sent in 2003 . Mobile-phone spam through text-messaging services exists, with American users reportedly receiving 1.5 billion spam messages in 2008. These messages often require the user to respond with "STOP" or "HELP" in order to prevent reception of further spam messages, thereby necessarily sapping unsolicited victims' time and attention. Social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, are likewise not immune to spam. In social networking spam, spammers often use dummy accounts, which exist primarily to spam, or worse yet they hack legitimate users accounts in order to send links to friends and family members under the guise of a trusted contact. Online game messaging systems are vulnerable to spam, as users can flood channels with messages and thus disrupt legitimate communication. Blog spamming, or comment spam, exists on websites which allow commenting. Blog spammers fill comment sections with links to their blogs, thereby raising their page's rank in search engine results.

Ethical Implications

Spamming has many negative effects upon targets and is almost always recognized as wrong or bad.

There are direct costs related to spam, such as unnecessary loss of human resources in combating it and environmental costs due to the energy resources which spam wastes, as well as collateral harms which often accompany them, such as financial theft, identity theft, data and intellectual property theft, virus and other malware infection, child pornography, fraud, and deceptive marketing.

Economic loss

Spam has been estimated to result in vast economic losses. The European Union estimates that spam costs internet users €10 billion per year. The California legislature found that spam cost United States organizations alone more than $13 billion in 2007

Email spam exemplifies a negative economic situation known as tragedy of the commons. A tragedy of the commons occurs through email spam because spammers are able to use up resources (eg., bandwidth, energy, human labor) without bearing the costs of their consumption, as most of the cost of spamming lies on its recipients. This added cost consequently raises the price of goods and services associated with the commons (i.e., the internet, here); for example, spam can be associated with higher computer-security software costs and higher internet-service provider costs to end users.

Energy drain

Globally, spam energy use totals 33 billion kilowatt-hours (KWh) per year, with greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 3.1 million passenger cars using 2 billion United States gallons of gasoline. Users' viewing and deleting of spam accounts for the largest spam-related energy drain--almost 18 billion kWh or almost 52% of total spam energy.

Search engine harm

Spamming can decrease the accuracy and relevancy of search results, thereby breaking the system for search-engine users. For example, the practice of blog spamming, in which spammers unsolicitedly place links to their website in the comments sections of blogs, can push a page to the top of Google search results due to the value of certain variables in its PageRank algorithm