Impact of Spam and Role of Legislation
Do you consider spam to be an important issue? Has it significantly affected you in any way?
3. The response was unanimously yes. Spam has markedly eroded people's confidence in the reliability of email (through false-positive spam detection and anti-spam measures that misfire). While effective filtering reduces the overall quantity of spam reaching the end user, this is merely a movement of the burden, not a solution.
Do you think legislation has a role to play alongside other complementary measures?
4. Almost all respondents agreed that legislation is required, especially for global cooperation and to prevent New Zealand from becoming a haven for spamming.
5. Some organisations favour self regulation, but understand the need for legislation for the reasons above.
6. Email is a legitimate and often effective marketing communication medium, but some businesses have concerns that compliance costs and "the prospect of being accused of spamming in the course of attempting productive communication" will be an "intimidating deterrent" to using email as a marketing tool. There was comment that the legislation in Australia has been labelled a "disproportionate solution to the spam problem".
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