Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Nextel On Cellphone Spam- "Nextel claims they've never done it"

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2003 09:10:15 -0400

Et Tu, AT&T Wireless?
Source: Forbes
Publication date: 2003-06-09
Arrival time: 2003-06-06

Cell phone carriers don't want your phone getting spammed, unless the
spam is from them

Some AT&T wireless customers recently got this text message on their
mobile: "Need help using your phone internationally? If dialed from your
mobile, free Intlcare is available at 1-916-843-4685." The message came
from AT&T, but you wouldn't have known that until you dialed the number
and heard the recorded message promoting its "international suite of
products."

Oh, great. It's bad enough that spam hogs 45% of e-mail traffic. Now the
phone company is beaming us cellular spam. Aren't these the guys who
are supposed to be protecting us from this junk?

That depends on how you define spam. If you define it as unasked- for
messages touting a service or product, then AT&T Wireless is spamming
its customers. But the company says sending in-house text ads to its
customers is fair game under the contract's privacy policies. Verizon and
Nextel claim they've never done it, Cingular has tried it a few times and
Sprint PCS says it stopped more than a year ago. But none would rule out
future spamming.

Carriers here are in a quandary.They perceive cell spam as a threat to the
nascent wireless text industry, but they want to be able to spam users
themselves. Cell phone spam is still so rare in the U.S. that no major
researcher has data on the number of ads in circulation. In Japan,
however, cell spam is a real problem. NTT Docomo, Japan's largest
wireless carrier, says that 17% of its 38 million iMode subscribers receive
up to five spams a day. (Docomo has that down from 30% in 2001, thanks
to better software filters and getting people to change their phone number.)

The number AT&T gave out to subscribers in its recent ad is in
Sacramento County. It so happens that a state assemblyman there, Tim
Leslie, wrote the California law passed in September that outlaws
spamming state residents' cell phones and pagers. Luckily for AT&T
Wireless, the bill exempts ads sent from companies and their affiliates
with which a cell user has a business relationship--an exemption the
phone companies lobbied hard for.

Like e-mail spam, wireless spam wastes time and resources, but it
needles recipients even more because it could cost plan minutes. At least
AT&T doesn't charge for its ads, restores minutes burned listening to the
recording and lets you opt out of receiving any further messages from the
company. But it takes about five minutes to do so on their Web site or
with the help of a service agent.

http://cnniw.yellowbrix.com/pages/cnnmoney/Story.nsp?story_id=39310662&ID=cnnmoney&scategory=Business+and+Finance&

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