My weekly Law Bytes column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) takes stock of the battle against spam one year after Canada’s National Task Force on Spam submitted its report. The column notes that while filtering has become more effective, first impressions can be deceiving. Global spam volume continues to increase, with recent surveys indicating that 80 percent of all e-mail is now spam. Spam has also become far more dangerous as many messages secretly contain viruses or other hidden programs that can unwittingly turn ordinary Internet users with broadband connections into large-scale spammers.
Unfortunately the Canadian legal framework has failed to keep pace with the new spam-related concerns.