AT&T Spam Their Customers

The NYT recently reported that AT&T had spammed its customers with text messages encouraging them to watch the season premiere of American Idol, a show which is sponsored by the company. According to the NYT, AT&T claim that the messages were not spam as the recipients were provided with an option to elect to opt out of future spam advertizing campaigns.  “It’s clearly marked in the message what you need to do if you don’t want to participate. It couldn’t be more open and transparent,” said an At&T spokesman.

The Federal Trade Commission agree that AT&T did nothing (legally) wrong. From the NYT article:

          Claudia Bourne Farrell, a spokeswoman for the Federal Trade Commission, said the message had not appeared to violate the commission’s rules or the law. It would do so only if it cost recipients or was deceptive in some way, and did not allow recipients to turn off future messages.

So, was this spam or not? To my mind, it undoubtedly was. The majority of people would probably define spam in much the same way that Wikipedia do (“Spam is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages”) and it’s a description which applies perfectly to AT&T’s messages. Whether or not AT&T actually broke the law is really by the by; the messages were spam. Plain and simple.

The fact that AT&T didn’t charge people to deliver the messages (oh, how nice of them!) is of no relevance whatsover. Unless you have bandwidth limits, you don’t pay to receive junk mail – but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t spam. And as for their opt-out clause… well, how often have you seen that appended to the end of an email pushing some potion that promises to put extra hair on your head?

What makes this case all the worse is that AT&T seemed to see nothing wrong with their actions. Had they admitted that sending the messages had been an act of bad judgement, then that would have been (slightly) more acceptable. We all make mistakes once in a while. But, by attempting to defend their actions, what they are in effect doing is saying to their customers, “Hey! If we can spam you legally, then you can bet your bottom dollar that that’s exactly what we’ll do!”

I’d be furious were my working day to be interrupted by texts pushing an inane TV show (or any other product or service, for that matter). Hopefully, AT&T customers will feel the same way and will be informing AT&T that, unless they clean up their act and change their policies, they’ll be looking for a new provider.