Spam is one of life's annoyances to most of us. But to many people spam actually causes psychological damage. With the new privacy-invasion techniques, spammers can target specific groups of people, such as those that visit a chat room for diabetics sufferers. Then they email all the diabetics with quack cures that will probably kill them. Then there are all those male enhancement ads -- apparently many men feel personally targeted by those.
The spewing of spam over the digital transom has long been derided as an annoyance and provoked concerns about the insecurity of computer networks. But now some e-mailers and experts on psychology and technology worry that it is also having a more pernicious effect: insecurity for the recipient.
With worldwide volumes having doubled in the past year, and ever-more sophisticated spammers singling out computer users with particular interests or problems, it can serve as a constant reminder of what is lacking for those with fragile egos — whether a sinuous body or an eight-cylinder sex drive.
"How do they know I need to (fill in the blank)?" the recipient wonders.
Delete, delete, delete.
"It can affect your emotions and your level of stress," said Jeffrey T. Parsons, a psychology professor at Hunter College, who has conducted research on sexuality and the Internet. "Once you get in a spam loop, you can get bombarded with these things four or five times a day, and that can definitely trigger insecurities and exacerbate ones that already exist."
Pam Fitzgerald, managing partner of a marketing company in Virginia who struggles with her weight, bristles at the diet-plan spam, wondering "who knows how much I weigh." And her heart aches for one of her young employees, the only one in the small firm not to have finished college, who seems to be a magnet for spam pushing Johnny-come-lately bachelor's degree programs. "It's rubbing him raw day in and day out," she said. Worsening the psychic toll is the increasingly focused tailoring of spam of all stripes.
Legitimate retailers buy contact lists of e-mail addresses, while underground computer hacks trade — or steal — them. Spammers often steal e-mail addresses from topic-oriented and corporate Web sites with scores of registered users, and also corral highjacked networks of personal computers called botnets to glean specific information from other computers' hard drives, like e-mail address books.
Ok, news flash: everyone on the planet gets the weight loss and male enhancement spam emails. The only thing we can figure out from our spam is that someone has decided we are absolute idiots who will turn over our bank account information to some deposed Nigerian count who has $50,000,000 he needs to get out of the country ASAP. And apparently we're just the fools to help him do it.
