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Verizon Charges New 'Spam' Fee For Texts Sent From Teachers To Students (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A free texting service used by teachers, students, and parents may stop working on the Verizon Wireless network because of a dispute over texting fees that Verizon demanded from the company that operates the service. As a result, teachers that use the service have been expressing their displeasure with Verizon. Remind -- the company that offers the classroom communication service -- criticized Verizon for charging the new fee. Remind said its service's text message notifications will stop working on the Verizon network on January 28 unless Verizon changes course. (Notifications sent via email or via Remind's mobile apps will continue to work.) The controversy cropped up shortly after a Federal Communications Commission decision that allowed U.S. carriers' text-messaging services to remain largely unregulated. Verizon says the fee must be charged to fund spam-blocking services. Remind said in a statement: "To offer our text-messaging service free of charge, Remind has always paid for each text that users receive or send. Now, Verizon is charging Remind an additional fee intended for companies that send spam over its network. Your Remind messages aren't spam, but that hasn't helped resolve the issue with Verizon. The fee will increase our cost of supporting text messaging to at least 11 times our current cost -- forcing us to end free Remind text messaging for the more than 7 million students, parents, and educators who have Verizon Wireless as their carrier."
...them teachers switched to something like WhatsApp.
Didn't see the sarcasm tag so I'm assuming that's serious. Teachers cannot use private messaging services like WhatsApp, at least in the US. All communication with students has to be archived as it should be accessible to parents via the Freedom of Information App. It also protects teachers from unfounded accusations by students.
The problem is *not* that Verizon has decided to go after one particular School SMS provider.
Rather, Verizon has decided to charge bulk SMS providers (in this case, Twilio) a per-text-message fee. This fee is said to help pay for Verizon's anti-spam efforts.
Twilio then decided to pass this fee to customers in the exact amount Verizon charged.
Two other providers in Canada (Rogers & Bell) already charge Twilio similar fees, and other carriers are expected to do so soon.
Remind just happens to be a Twilio customer. But all Twilio customers {and customers of similar SMS services} are affected.
My daycare uses the Remind app. Since I'm on Verizon, I received an in app message about this coming down the line the other day. However; my son's Pre-K teacher (who is registered with the county's school system) uses an app called Seesaw Family which is more like a messenger-style app. She has it set up so that only parents and approved extended family are allowed to sign up for her messages. She can send group messages or individual messages as needed and we can send private messages back to her to ask questions. It's free for us (parents) to use, but I'm not sure if she, or her affiliated school, had to pay a setup fee. Apps like that might be worth other teachers looking into.
Except that Remind actually IS NOT spamming. I'm not sure how often this is used to communicate directly with students in upper grades or college. My experience is with it used in elementary school for the teachers to send information to the parents. It also allows parents to respond back to the group, and one parent to respond to any other parent in the class. And it does this without anyone having to share their email address or phone number with each other. The parents voluntarily sign up for the list, so it's not spam even if you don't like the messages being sent.
All communication with students has to be archived as it should be accessible to parents via the Freedom of Information App.
Wait, what?
You can't be talking about the Freedom Of Information Act, because that only covers making federal records available. It doesn't actually mandate keeping any records, though - that's covered by other acts like the Presidential Records Act which has been in the news lately.
For educational records, there is the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, but that has a similar effect in that it allows for records to be reviewed and corrected, but it doesn't appear (in my quick reading) to actually require schools to make new records.
It also protects teachers from unfounded accusations by students.
That seems more like the actual reason.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Not everyone has smartphones or data access. In my sons' school district there are plenty of kids whose financial situation isn't very good. They might have a bare bones phone with little to no data access. They can't afford to suck up data by installing apps (or their phone literally can't install apps) just to get reminders. For these kids, text messages work better.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Remind sends emails to every teacher they can to try to get them to use their "free" service.
Not really true and even if it were there is nothing unethical about trying to reach a target audience.
Once enough teachers in a district start using it, Remind contacts the school district to inform them that they are breaking the law and the paid version that archives the communications can be bought for tens of thousands of $$ a year.
That is not their business model.
This company has a business model based on borderline extortion. Hope they go out of business
This is quite simply a lie. I use their app and so does our school district. They don't extort anyone.