September 16th, 2005
The End User: Mind What You Sign
By Victoria Shannon
International Herald Tribune
Nary a day goes by that I don’t get junk e-mail on my mobile phone, despite the fact that I have checked the box on my provider’s Web site that says “no.”
It’s only one or two a day, but sometimes they annoyingly chirp their arrival in the middle of the night. The spam isn’t even very original, consisting mostly of boring old Viagra come-ons.
But I may be one of the lucky ones. In Britain, California and elsewhere, complaints about unwanted mobile data or unsought charges for data are piling up. At least I’m not paying to get my phone spam.
It has been only in the past year that mobile data has been useful, fast and cheap enough for ordinary mobile users to buy in Europe and the United States. Parts of Asia, of course, have had data-friendly phone services - and, therefore, wireless spam - for many years.
To sign up for such services, you have to tell your carrier to add a data subscription to your existing plan and upgrade your SIM card.
It can cost as little as 6, or $7.35 extra a month, and lets your phone receive e-mail, multimedia messages and the Internet. (Sometimes you have to upgrade your phone as well, depending on how new your model is.)
Many gripes over mobile data services this year have been generated by Crazy Frog, that ubiquitous ring tone of a revved-up moped that back in May inexplicably topped the British singles chart.
According to the complaints, when consumers downloaded the ring tone from the Crazy Frog Web site, they were billed for a ring tone subscription they didn’t want and didn’t ask for.
A San Diego man sued the ring tone’s promoter, saying the company fraudulently sold ring tones to his underage daughter. Jamster has denied all the accusations, but certainly the media attention could not be good for the company.
There are other ways to get mischarged. Sometimes, text messages are sent to hundreds of thousands of users at once, encouraging them either to call a premium-rate number or respond with a text message for the chance to collect a nonexistent prize or pick up a fake voicemail message.
And then there’s just the annoyance factor associated with phone spam, a byproduct that has incalculable value.
Mobile junk and unsolicited charges have spurred a handful of “bill of rights” proposals for cellphone consumers around the world. Most of them are voluntary and come from the telecommunications industry itself, a powerful lobby that presumably would like to avoid having governments impose regulations.
In fact, California’s public utility commission suspended its telecommunications bill of rights this year because “the regulations imposed too many unreasonable burdens and restrictions on a wireless industry that is vital to the state’s economy,” ConsumerAffairs.Com reported.
A messaging company, SMS.ac, offered its own guidelines for mobile carriers last month. Among its six points were clear description and pricing; prompt delivery and customer satisfaction; and a money-back refund.
“This isn’t a trivial problem,” Craig Barrack, founder of Mobile Networking, a consulting firm, writes in New Media Age this month. “Irresponsible subscriptions are turning customers off in droves and could set the mobile content industry back years.”
Commercial Alert, a Ralph Nader organization in Oregon, this summer urged the U.S. Congress to investigate wireless carriers’ marketing to teenagers and even grade-school-aged children, more of whom are carrying cellphones.
“Despite the industry’s rhetoric,” the group said, carriers and other content providers “really want to use children as conduits to their parents’ wallets.”
Last month, Jamster, the British mobile data company owned by VeriSign, brought the Crazy Frog ring tone to the United States along with an energetic marketing campaign.
It remains to be seen whether unwary consumers there will be bemoaning this latest British invasion.
Comments
- Posted by Zeke on September 17th, 2005
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Consumers do not need a bill of rights. All that needs to be done is to remove the right of free speech from corporations. That is, do not have the law treat corps as individual humans. This is a relatively new idea and has borne nothing but misery for consumers.