RSSSurvey: Users More Accepting of Spam
By Ed Oswald | Published April 11, 2005, 11:22 AM
A new survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project suggests that people may be getting used to dealing with spam in their inboxes these days. Spam is also being cited as a cause for a marked decline in the number of people who trust that what comes into their inbox is genuine e-mail.
53 percent of users trust their e-mail, down from 62 percent last year. However, a smaller portion of Internet users, 22 percent, are spending less time online due to spam, versus 29 percent last year.
Deborah Fallows of Pew Internet, the study's author, said that the results may show a "level of tolerance" of e-mail spam. "Maybe it's their getting used to it. Maybe it's like other annoying things in life, air pollution, traffic - they are just learning to live with it."
Pornographic spam is on a decline, but phishing scams -- e-mails that attempt to trick users into giving their personal information -- is on the rise.
Some users are also becoming smarter in efforts to stop spam. There were slight increases in the number of people who do not post their e-mail addresses on public Web sites, as well as set up e-mail addresses that are hard for automated programs to guess.
The Pew Internet study surveyed 1,121 adults and had an error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
"The Pew Internet study surveyed 1,121 adults and had an error of plus or minus 3 percentage points."
that surely represents accurately the millions if not billions of worldwide internet users.
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|90% of all statistics are numbers... the other 10% appear to be letters but are actually ASCII code that got mixed up and needs to be phsyco-analized.
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|statistics are numbers - yes, and can be interpreted any way the interpreter desires. My favorite example of how "screwed" using statistical numbers to form an opinion is this:
"According to the national traffic safety foundation, 20% of all highway fatalities are caused by drunk drivers." everyone loves to use this number to cite how dangerous drunk drivers are. They can also be used to cite that the drunk drivers are the safe ones because the number shows us that 80% of all highway fatalities are caused by sober people. Those Bast*rd sober drivers are so dang dangerous they should all be hung, drawn and quarted :)
See how idiotic statistcs are? :) I in no way approve of drinking an ddriving btw. I DO however love to use that example to show how much of a lemming people are in believing what they are told as long as someone attaches numbers to it and calls it statistics. get a brain and a life :)
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|According to Pew Research, people enjoy making minimum wage and having no healthcare and paying $3 for gas! Why report such obviously false "studies" and "reports" from a survey organization that refuses to disclose its sampling methods? Just say no.
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|They may be accurate as far as how many people said "yes" compared to "no", but hey I am not (lol finally fixed the "snot" :) spending less time due to spam BECAUSE I NEVER GET SPAM. Ever thoughta that? Or that some people have better spam filters now than they did a year ago? Or how about the fact that spam causes MORE TIME spent on the computer fixing the darn problems? This study shows the opposite of what the title claims if you ask me.
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|It isn't necessarily the statistics that are bad but the interpretations. The fact that less people are trusting of emails they receive is a reflection of the greater number of phishing scams that are out there now. The fact that people aren't spending less time online because of spam is due to the fact that for many people that really isn't a choice anymore. With so much communications being done via email it is tough today for most people to just decide to not use email. This in turn forces people to spend more time going through spam instead of more productive activities.
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