The attack of the spammers

We all are exposed to spammers at many facets of our life. Though I was introduced first time to the word spam sometime in college, while dealing with Email Spam, we all know that it has existed far before that. Didn't we have those pesky Door-to-door marketers. They were unsolicited. They were more often than unwanted. Even more importantly, you could not verify any claims that made and they were not authenticated to be good for you. You also had to spend your resources to deal with them or ward them off. So, here's my list of characteristics of spams:

• Not authorized to contact you (Unsolicited and Unwanted)
• No authenticity
• Drainage of your resources (time, energy, money, compute-power etc)

As time goes, the avenues used by the spammers seem to shift from time to time. In the compute Industry alone, it started off with email-spam, supported by viruses, then moved to link spam, blog spam, and now social spam. You have spammers presence in Facebook, Orkut etc befriending you to take advantage of you (either to make contact with some attractive person) or just to steal identity/data.

Now, the latest version of spam I am witnessing is in LinkedIn. Create a profile, call yourself a HR consultant, touch base with people and you have access to their large connection set. Having connections is important in LinkedIn, because it forms the basis of who you can contact and it is a prominent piece of your profile itself. And since LinkedIn over the years has become a quintessential productivity tool and it has been the playground of only the professionals, you tend to attach a lot of value. But if spam continues unabated, it will be yet another place of no use to people. I can't trust people on LinkedIn anymore.

I personally try not to add anybody I don't know or have not worked with. When I rejected one such person's request, she actually said - "sir, it won't be of use to you, but for me, it will give connections". Nice!

Facebook of allowing people only with network ids to join a network (.iitk.ac.in for IIT Kanpur) partially solves the problem. I know that people who are part of the network are surely trustworthy. But I also know that a large populace of Indian Internet users can't be part of networks because they don't have dedicated ids from any organization.

I am sure that LinkedIn and others have mechanism to ward off such things (including above method from Facebook) and you can take recourse there and I am sure, eventually spamming will become a no-issue as it is in mail today, but till then it is a damn PITA - pain in the a**. And till then I will keep cribbing and wishing that the whole problem goes away.