Anti-spam legislation will help fight spammers

A local anti-spam legislation could prevent Hong Kong from becoming a safe haven sheltering illicit spammers, the Secretary for Commerce, Industry and Technology, Mr John Tsang, said today (April 28).

Speaking at a luncheon meeting of the Foreign Correspondents' Club, Mr Tsang said such legislation would facilitate co-operation with overseas jurisdictions in investigation and enforcement work against spammers, and should have a deterrent effect on irresponsible e-marketers spamming fax and automated dialling pre-recorded marketing messages.

"Over the past two months, we have been discussing actively with stakeholder groups from the ICT industry, the business sector, legal experts and consumer organisations on the draft legislative framework with a view to finding a balance between protecting recipients' rights on the one hand, and enabling the proper development of e-marketing and e-commerce on the other," Mr Tsang said.

"We also explored the merits of the 'opt-in' and the 'opt-out' approaches, and how each would impact on the business sector. We aim to firm up the framework for wider public consultation later this year and introduce the legislation into the Legislative Council the following year.".

The secretary also gave an update on all government initiatives to contain the problem of spam under the "STEPS" campaign announced in February this year.

In the area of strengthening existing regulatory measures, the Government is actively discussing with fixed network operators the possibility of reducing the timeframe required to cut off access to telecommunications services by irresponsible fax advertisers who persistently ignore recipients' advice not to send them further fax advertisements.

The Government is also discussing with mobile network operators to extend an existing Code of Practice for the handling of inter-operator unsolicited promotional Short Message Service (SMS) to cover intra-operator unsolicited promotional SMS.

"We are hopeful that, in the next few months, these improvement measures would be put in place, and the problem can be better moderated," Mr Tsang said.

On technical solutions, the Government is liaising with the industry to organise seminars and conferences in the next few months to encourage users to adopt technical solutions to protect themselves from spam e-mail. A dedicated theme page to enable the public to learn more about the latest technical solutions and the spam problem is being developed.

Furthermore, the Government was also developing a targeted education and promotion programme to raise everyone's level of awareness, including youngsters, adults, businesses and industry players, about how they could do their part to fight spam and to provide them with accurate information and useful resources through various channels. These education programmes will be launched in the next month or so.

Regarding partnership, Mr Tsang emphasised that the Government was continuing to foster international partnerships with overseas agencies.

"As announced yesterday, my Bureau has become one of the 12 founding signatories of a Multilateral Memorandum of Understanding on Co-operation in Countering Spam. The MoU facilitates signatory agencies across the Asia-Pacific region to share knowledge, information and intelligence about known sources of spam, network vulnerabilities, methods of spam propagation, and technical, educational and policy solutions to the spam problem. It also focuses on putting anti-spam solutions and strategies into action.

"We look forward to developing positive and mutually beneficial co-operative relationships with fellow agencies under the framework of the MoU.

"Locally, we are encouraging industry organisations to develop codes of practice and best practice guidelines to combat spam. Specifically, we are discussing with the Internet Service Provider industry in Hong Kong on the feasibility of developing a common blacklist for more effective screening of spam e-mails," Mr Tsang said.

Ends/Thursday, April 28, 2005