Why Is Email Spam So Much Worse Than SMS Spam?; digg_bodytext = How come email spam is a 5,000,000% bigger problem than text message spam?
In this week’s Security Levity, I want to talk about spam again — not email spam, but spam sent via SMS. Also known as text message spam. I want to get to the bottom of whether SMS spam is as big a problem as email spam — and if not, why not? The situation varies around the world — some of this is due to the different views on spam in various cultures, similar to email spam. For example SMS spam in China is much more prevalent than it is in the West, but the locals are far more tolerant of it than Westerners are. A widely-quoted statistic on SMS spam is from Ferris Research, who estimated that 1.5 billion spammy text messages were received in the U.S. during 2008. That sounds like a big number, but a year is a long time and there are tens of millions of subscribers in the country. I work that out as about one spam message per person per quarter, on average — some people will get more, some less. It’s occasionally annoying, but incomparable to the email spam problem, where a typical
