First published: 26th May 2007
Hong Kong's law-making body, the Legislative Council (LegCo), passed the "Unsolicitied Electronic Messages (UEM) Bill" on Wednesday, 23rd May 2007. Writing in his newsletter, the Hon. Sin Chung Kai, LegCo member for the IT Functional Constituency, welcomed the Bill, predicting that it would reduce the number of nuisance e-messages by 80% once it came into operation.
However, Hon. Sin recognised that enforcement would be the biggest challenge, writing, "The government thus should do for the next is to evaluate the difficulties on the law enforcement" sic.
Allan Dyer, Chief Consultant of Yui Kee Computing and long-time proponent of tougher anti-spam laws commented, "This is a step in the right direction, but only a small step. The final Bill retained the biggest flaws of the draft: adopting an opt-out regime, and restricting the regulations to commercial messages. It also limits the Hong Kong link to messages originating or terminating in Hong Kong, spam relayed through Hong Kong will be unaffected."
Mr. Dyer also doubted Hon. Sin's prediction, "I would be ecstatic if the Bill reduces spam by 80%, but it is about as likely as an email from someone wanting to send me millions of dollars actually being true."
The law is expected to come into operation later this year.
Updated: 29th May 2007
The UEM Ordinance will be published in the Gazette on 1st June, 2007 and implemented in two phases. The first phase, taking effect on 1st June, will make activities like using zombie botnets to send spam, address harvesting and dictionary attacks, falsifying headers and forging messages an offence.
Phase two will be implemented towards the end of 2007 and will introduce do-not-call registers for phone and fax, and require a functional unsubscribe facility.