Bill Gates promised 16 years ago that the spam problem would be “solved” by 2006.
As we begin the year 2020, the pandemic of unwanted advertising is not only still a problem on email, but we’re experiencing an epidemic of robocalls, robotexts, social spam and “review spam” as well. Spam is both growing and spreading.
The real problem with Spam happens at the cultural level. It causes us to abandon superior communications media.
The good news is that new efforts are creating new hope for Gates’ predicted end of spam.
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The trouble with spam
Email is still the world’s biggest platform for spam. Half the world’s population uses email. And more than half of all email is spam. The good news is that the figure is dropping the percentage of email that was spam peaked in 2012 at 69 percent.
Calls are another huge problem. The FTC got 5.7 million complaints about robocalls and live spam phone calls last year.
In the past couple of years, a pandemic of Chinese-language robocalls has plagued Americans. If you don’t speak Mandarin (which most of the victims don’t), you won’t know that these recorded calls are hawking scams like…
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