Controlling spams and scams

THERE IS a big difference between spams and scams.

There is really no hard and fast definition, but I would liken spams to a wrongdoing, and scams to a sin.

Another way to define it is to say that a spam is a misdemeanor, while on the other hand, a scam is a crime.

Right now, there are no clear rules t hat could be used i n controlling spams, except of course that the “victims” could report the “perpetuators” to the service providers, and the later could either suspend or cancel their accounts.

Right now, there is also no real clear distinction between what is a spam and what is not, because some legitimate messages could also be mistaken as spam. What is clear, however, is a scam is identifiable, and there are enough government agencies that are tasked to enforce the laws that are regulating them.

There are enough yes, but some scammers might still be able to get away if there are cracks or gray areas between the functions of two or more government agencies.

Generally speaking, most of the scams would fall under the jurisdiction of the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), because the victims of the scammers are almost always the consumers of goods and services.

There could, however, be some gray areas or overlaps in the case of some technical services such as mobile and internet services, wherein the jurisdiction could be under the National Telecommunications Commission or the Department of Information and Communication Technology.

As far as I know however, they are coordinating with each other.

LAPSES IN WATER SECURITY

There is no way around it, because for sure, lapses in water security could lead to problems in food security. Of course, it is true that water is life, but water is also necessary to produce the food that sustains human life.

A perfect example of this is the cooking of rice. You might already have the rice grains, lots of it, but you cannot cook it if you do not have lots of water.

In a recent incident in Baguio City, several people including some tourists fell ill supposedly because of contaminated water. The good news it, it was not the tap water that was contaminated.

What was reportedly contaminated was the water that was delivered by the water trucks. The bad news is that there seems to be no system to monitor the safety of water delivered by way of these trucks.

In a previous article, I already wrote about the need to regularly monitor the safety of both tap water and bottled water. I was able to confirm that there is now a system in place to monitor these two water sources, although the inspection schedules are not as frequent as I wanted it to be.

Apparently, the inspection of water trucks is not included in this system. What happened in Baguio City should be a wake-up call for all of us that not only should we include the safety of tap water and bottled water more frequently, we should now also include the inspection of trucked water.

To add to that, we should now transfer the function of water safety to the LGUs, under the direct supervision of the DILG. /