Spam costs Hong Kong $769M in 2004

Hong Kong's technology chief announced that spam cost the economy $769M last year in a recent press release.

This would probably explain the recent government involvement there in the legal sense to try to stop spam.

As with any of these announcements, the figures are always huge (and even bigger of the party reporting them stands to benefit from a larger number) - so take that with a grain of salt. They are looking at resources in terms of worker time and network bandwidth when they calculate these costs - and while I am in no way implying that spam isn't an issue, reports like this are usually not accurate in true cost. Were there no spam, it doesn't necessarily mean that their economy would have seen that money elsewhere since some of it involves sunk costs as well.
Don't get me wrong though, I'm all for getting more people to be aware and frustrated with spam so that more will be done to stop it.

Posted by Eric at February 25, 2005 09:30 AM | TrackBack