February 12th, 2006
One Mother's Wake-Up Call
By Don Oldenburg
Washington Post
Cell phones for kids are a hot ticket lately. If you’ve got a ‘tweener or teen in the house, you know this all too well. Either the kid’s got a cell phone (and is checking out ads for newer models) or is begging for his first.
While it doesn’t have the cachet of the first driver’s license or first kiss, that first cell phone has already reached rite-of-passage status. To the child, it’s a symbol of responsibility and freedom—not to mention a fascinating high-tech toy. To a concerned parent wanting a where-are-you-now link, it’s nearly as good as a homing implant.
So it rang true when Consumer Reports recently reported that more than a third of 11- to 14-year-olds have their own wireless phone.
But wrong numbers do happen. As the number of cell-toting kids multiples, so do related issues—possible health risks, an anticipated assault of commercials, increased outsider access to kids. Oh, and did you see this month’s phone bill?
Maybe none is of the nightmare proportions portrayed in Stephen King’s new techno-thriller novel "Cell" (you don’t want to know), but they are problems. Some unexpected, as my colleague Roxanne Roberts discovered after buying her son, Carter, his first wireless phone for his 13th birthday.
"He’s getting around on his own more, and we thought he should have his own phone," says Roberts, who as half of the Reliable Source duo in The Post’s Style section knows her way around a telephone. Roberts signed up Carter for a Cingular "GoPhone" account—a pay-in-advance plan that charges 5 cents per text message and 25 cents per call. She set his monthly limit at $10, figuring that should accommodate a teenage newbie’s cell phone habit and teach him a little about sticking to a budget.
But within an hour after the account was activated, Carter’s new phone erupted with the rapid-fire beeps and buzzes of a couple dozen incoming text messages—the latest scores from the NFL and scoring possibilities from the online dating service Match.com. By the end of the day, half of his monthly budget was shot from the unwanted texting.
Roberts says she spent an hour on the phone with Cingular customer service trying to find out what was going on. The Cingular rep acknowledged that the text messages were coming from subscriptions to online services the previous owner of Carter’s cell phone number hadn’t canceled.
"There was a previous owner of this number?" Roberts asked.
"There’ve been six," replied the Cingular rep.
The revelation stunned Roberts. Potential risks raced through her head. "What if it was porn instead of sports scores?" she asked the Cingular rep. "And how long will it take you to make it stop?"
After the typical go-around consumers often face when calling customer service, Roberts persuaded a supervisor to delete the text charges. But the supervisor said Cingular couldn’t terminate "third-party" online services connected to Carter’s phone. Her advice: Keep the phone turned off and cancel the subscriptions yourself.
"I can’t believe Cingular and other phone companies are giving new owners used numbers that are still subscribed to services," Roberts says. "I find it pretty shocking that they can’t block previous text accounts. And I’m especially annoyed that it was somehow my responsibility to fix the problem and beg for charges to be credited back to the account."
The wireless phone industry doesn’t exactly publicize that it routinely recycles used cell phone numbers. But with the rapid growth of cell phone use, phone companies say it’s impossible to issue a brand new number to every new customer.
"We just surpassed the 200 million subscriber mark. We’re at 203 million," says Joe Farren, director of public affairs at CTIA—the Wireless Association, a trade group representing wireless phone companies. "Ten years ago, there were 33.7 million."
But problems such as Roberts’s arise due to the quick turn-around in reassigning numbers. Phone companies typically wait only 30 to 90 days—not long enough for online services to decide a nonpaying subscriber has moved on and to cancel the subscription. Cingular spokeswoman Alexa Kaufman says Cingular follows Federal Communications Commission guidelines for how long numbers can go unused between customers. "On average, phone numbers are dormant for about 90 days," she says.
Inheriting a number used to mean nothing more than receiving occasional wrong-number calls—the previous owner’s ex-wife, maybe, or a collection agency. But with Internet-capable technology, cell phones are now used for more than just talking. Now, cell phone users can subscribe to services charged to their monthly phone bills that upload ring tones, TV broadcasts, movie listings, dating links, NASCAR standings, weather reports, digital music, stock tracking, etc.
"If they have the technology to track exactly when, where and who I call—and charge me 45 cents a minute when I go over my minutes—why can’t they give my son a clean phone number?" asks Roberts, whose persistence eventually got someone at Cingular to end the subscriptions bombarding her son’s cell phone.
"Usually we weed all this out," says Farren, whose association members include major wireless phone carriers such as Sprint Nextel, Verizon and T-Mobile, all of which recycle wireless phone numbers and run into similar customer issues. "This is not a big problem."
Kaufman says Cingular has taken steps to "terminate subscription services once a number has been taken out of service." But, in some cases, customers subscribe to third-party sites that are harder for Cingular to clean from the account. "Cingular makes every effort to capture and terminate these subscriptions as we discover them," she says.
Despite Roberts’s difficulty getting the problem resolved, Kaufman says those customer service reps were out of line. "Cingular will gladly credit the charges and will assist the customer to terminate the subscription."
And Roberts’s porn fears? Cell phone smut is accessible through online sites, but it’s not nearly as big here as it is in Europe because major wireless carriers haven’t given the nod to charge phone porn to the phone bill.
Adamantly stating that "Cingular does not sell pornography," Kaufman says the company recently introduced parental controls "that can help parents manage their children’s use of the wireless Internet, including helping to block access to content that may be inappropriate for kids."
But Gary Ruskin thinks all this is indicative of a larger problem—and bigger risks—involving children with cell phones. "There are plenty of companies that see cell phones in kids’ hands as their next cash cow—and not just the telecommunications companies. It’s all of the 800- and 888-number companies and marketers," says Ruskin, executive director of Commercial Alert, a nonprofit consumer group in Portland, Ore., that is leading a campaign urging Congress to enact protections to make cell phones safer for kids.
He says giving marketers, or any kind of predator, more access to children is senseless. "There is a whole host of concerns that are raised by giving your kids cell phones . . . and the risks probably get bigger as time passes," he says. "Who is going to get your kid’s phone number next?"