Now I have nothing against advertisements, and if it’s something I’m interested in, I want to see it. But, I don’t want to have to pay ten cents for the privilege. Nobody should. And in a corporate environment, where a company may be paying for dozens, or hundreds of cell phone accounts, text message spam can add up to a big extra expenditure in the cell phone line item.

This week, U.S. Senators Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Bill Nelson (D-Fla) introduced a new piece of legislation called the m-SPAM Act. The legislation prohibits commercial text messages to wireless numbers that are on the Federal “Do Not Call” registry. The bill also gives more authority to the FCC and FTC to regulate the unwanted text message spam. The “Do Not Call” registry allows U.S. residents to place their phone numbers on a list, and solicitors are then not allowed to call. Until now though, there has been nothing to prevent spammers from sending out text messages to peddle whatever useless and overpriced thing they have on offer. The CAN-SPAM Act does not address text messaging.

Text message spam, besides being an annoyance, could potentially be dangerous, especially when sent to smartphone devices. It is conceivable that a text message could contain a virus or malicious software, or a link to a malicious Web site.

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New legislation to target text message spam

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.

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AT&T Spam Their Customers