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Declaring War on Mobile Phone Spam
RugbyHoe writes "Silicon.com's Will Sturgeon reports that more than two-thirds of mobile phone users have received spam on their cell phones and raises the concern that spam will become as much of a problem on this medium as it is with e-mail. He continues with a warning that many companies that offer downloadable ring tones are guilty of 'harvesting' your phone number. Think about that the next time you think you need to annoy your neighbors with the latest and greatest fiddy-cent ring tone."
just when I thought that text message about penis enlargement was someone picking me up!
why must you dash my hopes Slashdot?!
Mike
My ringtones have been costing me a dollar each!!!
With cellular instant messages, the phone user PAYS!
So far, I've only received one spam, and I talked to my CelTelCo about it. The first 1000 messages are free, but I pay-per-message afterwards.
I'll cancel that feature if I ever get more than 3 in the same week.
I thought that was illegal, since you will pay for them to send you spam. Am I correct about this?
-kaitos
I have got 3 sim cards the first 2 were on vigin mobile a virtual provider who uses T-mobile's network and both of them got a bucketload of spams, now I've got a O2-UK sim card and that number NEVER gets phone spam.
If you're getting a lot of it now might be the time to change operator
There is no god
...I think that if you have a land line as well as a cell phone, you can probably afford to set up your cell phone as a white-list system (accepting only calls from people in your directory list on the phone's memory). I can think of a few reasons you might not want to do this, but it still seems like a pretty good solution to me.
It's hardly a surprise that this is happening though, this is really no different than what has happened with land-line phones, e-mail and ICQ/IRC in the past. Advertising expands to fill all available spaces. The only difference here is that there is a very quantifiable cost involved with cell phones (unlike the percentage-of-bandwidth types of measurement with e-mail spam). If anything this should speed up the passing of an anti-cellphone spam law. IANAL, but shouldn't the existing laws for landlines also cover cell phones in some cases anyway?
lysergically yours
I think phone spamming will never get to the height of e-mail spamming. The reason is simple: sending out bulk e-mail costs almost nothing, sending out bulk phone messages is way more expensive. Of course there are ways around this (think cracking), but I think that will stop a lot of spammers.
In need of reliable and affordable server monitoring?
Well, except that it was amusing when entering Belgium you get a welcome message for Greece... Typical Orange: since it was taken over by France Telecom, it's just been one long journey downhill.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
While I was in Kuwait earlier this year, I noticed the Kuwait Ministry of the Interior sent cell phone SPAM messages almost daily (in English and Arabic) with government "feel good" messages" -
"Remain calm! All is well!"
JH
j.
Two thirds of who? Unless they surveyed the soccer moms, the 15 year old kids etc- I'd guess the statistic is heavily biased. For example, if it was an internet survey, you just nix'd a HUGE percentage of the population- a percentage of the population which is highly unlikely to have their #'s published on the internet, or use SMS, or even know what the hell SMS is- and I bet companies that send SMS messages to you legitimately(news/sports updates, and the article-mentioned ringtones) are happily selling out every address.
I've -never- recieved spam on my phone. Why? I don't give it to anyone unless they -need- it. I also don't advertise it on my webpage. I don't use sports/news/weather alert crap. There are groups of people who have to give their # out to clients etc, and who put it on their company/personal webpages. They're gonna get spam, that simple.
So where'd that statistic come from? If you scan through the article, you find the source:
"A recent survey conducted by Silicon.com reveals that 69 percent of respondents have received spam on their mobile phone." (side note: the entire article is actually from Silicon.com, some two-bit site).
So, we have a no-name site giving no information about how the survey was conducted(online? People off the street? Telephone? Magazine card? Mobile device convention? All will return drastically different results). We have no information about the demographics of the respondants, and whether they match cell phone users as a whole. Thus it is impossible to verify their claim of "all cell phone users".
When are people going to learn that you CANNOT generalize? You MUST be specific. As an example(and not implying that this is the exact situation in the story)- "Two thirds of respondants at a mobile communications conference said they had received spam on their cell phone". Yet some marketdroid would happily turn that into "two thirds of cell phone users get spam on their cellphone!"
Please help metamoderate.
Code of Federal Regulations, Title 47, Volume 3, Parts 40 to 69
Sec. 64.1200 Delivery restrictions.
(a) No person may:
(1) Initiate any telephone call (other than a call made for emergency purposes or made with the prior express consent of the called party) using an automatic telephone dialing system or an artificial or prerecorded voice,
(iii) To any telephone number assigned to a paging service, cellular telephone service, specialized mobile radio service, or other radio common carrier service, or any service for which the called party is charged for the call
* Q
P.S. If you don't get this note, let me know and I'll write you another.
My number is one digit off from a local radio stations contest line, does that count as spam?
:-)
I badly want to answer "You WIN, come down to the station in the next hour", then turn the phone off.
Bah, my current cellphone recently had it's number changed as the first 3 digits were the dyslexic's choice to dial for a local credit union.
and yes the last 4 were the same.
I gave many people a scare that after answering it normally they still asked for information on their account...
"Yes, mam. your account is overdrawn by $5982.53... no I dont know who.. all it shows is that you came in and withdrew money last sunday... Mam, computers dont lie...."
Or....
"I'm sorry sir, but your account was frozen by the federal government under suspicion of terrorist activities. I cant give out any more information..."
It was quite a blast there for a while
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
...and should be illegal. I want to be careful not to make an assertions that would jeopardize the 1st Amendment, but I feel that telemarketing in general is unethical. Here's my reasoning:
I pay a lot of money for various phone services (> $100/month). Advertising is not one of those services. My phone is not a free ride for marketers.
When telemarketers use the phone line to reach my phone, they are getting a free ride on a service for which I am the one who pays. In a very real sense, I am paying for someone else to have the ability to advertise to me. This is just ridiculous. My land line (which I am essentially required to maintain in order to have certain other utilities) might as well be a direct connection to commercials 24/7. Literally, something like 1 call in 100 is not phone spam. That means I'm paying $20-something dollars per month for the privilege of receiving advertisements. Ridiculous. Would I do this willingly?! Of course not. Do I have a choice? Apparently not. My phone and my wallet are held hostage by telemarketers.
In the UK, SMS spam is starting to become a real problem, but it seems people obey the TPS system. Register your number at http://www.tps-online.org.uk and say goodbye to your troubles. I registered my number a little under a year ago and I haven't got any spam since.
In Finland the caller always pays, and it is illegal to send spam or try to sell stuff via sms. No offence but in most countries people are trying to figure out what Americas cellphone companies are trying to accomplish, cause they just dont seem to know what they are doing.
In Hong Kong, it costs $ to send sms. So, no one sends spam or has $ to send spam. However, company do pay cellular service providers for phone # (trust me, your cellular service provider sells your # and even your phone record for behavior tracking.) and pay to send message (promotions) to those #. Since it costs $, promotional mesg is not very often.
Before I got call intercept service, everytime I got a telemarketing call on my land phone line , this was my conversation with the telemarketer:
Telemarketer - "Sir, my name is Poor_Kid and I am calling on to let you know about our new offer called Rip_you_off"
Me - "Why did you call me on my cellphone"
Telemarketer - "Sir, I am sorry. I did not know that it was your cellphone number"
Me - "You bet it is !! Now take my cellphone number off of your call list."
Telemarketer - "Will do sir. You have a good day."
You think SMS spam is bad, soon we'll see voice spam. Yes, it's already illegal within most countries to call somebody to play a recording, but the price of the telecom infrastructure is getting low enough to make it productive to do from overseas.
Unlike email and SMS spam, content analysis, filters and bayes will not help you deal with voice spam. The only thing you can do is track high volume users and shut them down.
And caller-ID has less security than you think.
Voice spam will be a curse on VoIP where there are not per minute costs, just bandwidth costs. And while there is security there in the specs, it is rarely implemented.
Solutions will be harder to find here.
According to California Business and Professions Code 17538.41 et seq., mobile phone spam is illegal and the victim may recover $500 plus court costs should he bring an action against the spammer.
Zaphod B
When duplication is outlawed, only outlaws will have
This is not a joke: I would not mind phone ads, under certain (not current) circumstances.
In the same way that I like advertisers to subsidize the creation of Futurama (well, past tense) and for me to watch reruns of Columbo, I would happily allow advertisers to pay for my phone use.
How? Imagine a system where between each phone call, you agree to listen to an advertisement, which would be (you guessed it) *very* closely tailored to you. e.g., no tampax ads for men, no thinning hair cures for men for 16-year-old girls.
Would I like to have *unsolicted* spam sent to me? No. Would I voluntarily let through a few ads each day in exchange for a bill of zero dollars? Yes.
Note there are a lot of permutations here, could be a limit of free calls, longer ads for more air time, maximum call length without hitting a surcharge, etc.
I would not want an hour of this, but there's probably a happy medium. Ask yourself, are you completely opposed to letting advertisers subsidize other things? And if the answer is No, wouldn't you rather let the spammers (who could be "advertisers") at least chip in toward the useful side of things?
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I'm sick of hearing about the "War on" this or the "War on" that. As a civilization we're well past this cheap and easy metaphor. Why "war on" anything? How well have our past "Wars" gone:
- LBJ's war on poverty
- Nixon's war on cancer
- Reagan's war on drugs
- W's war on terrorism
To paraphrase the best source for "War" info: remember when we had that war on drugs and now there aren't drugs anymore?Seems having a "War on" something makes it omnipresent and ustoppable.
-dameron
The SMS Spammers, too, have a price point. Maybe they will find they can tolerate having to spend a cent per message sent in the way some email Spammers have found they can tolerate losing accounts at a rate of one per minute. I don't think MMF scams are that lucrative, but who knows?
But what happens if the price point for the SMS providers and the price point for the SMS Spammers are compatible? You won't see SMS providers kicking SMS Spammers off their network as long as they pay their bill.
In a way, this has already happened in email, thus our spam problems there. It also seems to have happened (to some extent) with telemarketing. I don't know if we'll see this problem develop with SMS, but I do belive many many services are vulnerable to this threat. Will we eventually see a problem of IM spamming (more than we already have)? What about SPAM files on P2Pnetworks? (Oh wait; we've seen that one too.) I wonder how easy it will be to tie a SPAMblaster into a SIP-phone implementation for automated telemarketing once SIP phones become commonplace? I wonder how long after that we'll see a SIP-enabled PROCMAIL filter.
More generally; are we as a society willing to tolerate such SPAM-cancer in all of our communication networks, or will we eventually evolve into a society where we cannot even talk to each other unless we've already been whitelisted?
Free Speech means nothing if we all chosen to go deaf. I sense bad Juju here.
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
Japan has always been a bit ahead of us in the cellphone business, and they have fixed this problem. No longer does your cellphone have ##########@att-mobile.net, but instead its a 20 character random string (ex: d3f65f2ks8iure0kh8b7@docomo.ne.jp), with the option of setting your own alias as well.
This doesnt entirely alievate the problem, but it does increase the time needed for a while loop to hit the entire user base. Supposedly this has helped.
The number of characters might be variable as well (not sure about this), which would increase the time needed even more.
I find it amusing that as I read this article, Slashdot is displaying banner ads for "49 cent ringtones and graphics!", "Free Nokia Ringtones", and "RingtoneJukebox.com."