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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."
Is that spammers never believe the messages they send are spam.
Sorry, I don't need a bunch of BS being sent to my cell phone. If I'm in school, tell me in person. If it's after hours, leave me the hell alone.
I don't know which horse to bitch at here.
On the one hand teachers and schools are beyond naive when it comes to internet services and data privacy. Every year it's a new 'teacher favourite app of the day' service that my child gets signed into. My child is either automatically registered without my/her permission, or pressured by the teacher to become 'part of the group' if she refuses. These services require everything you need to know about a person. Name, age, birthdate, address, cellphone number (obviously). It's a mass handover of personal information. All because the service is "free" and it will make the teacher's life "so much more convenient". Nearly all these services are operated from out of country. If there's a more obvious example of mass surveillance, I don't know what that is. Teachers/schools don't need to know where my child is and what they're doing outside of school hours and property. Third parties don't need to have my child's personal information handed to them on a platter. So fuck off and die teachers for subscribing to these services.
On the other hand, charging per-message fees to pay for spam protection is equally shitty.
If Android and IOS could just put down the hand grenades for one moment and agree on a common texting over internet protocol, then we wouldn't have to rely on SMS texting in the first place.
Install an app
I don't want another push app that simply re-implements SMS/MMS.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I don't understand why Remind wants to use SMS so badly? Install an app and communicate through that. This isn't a problem.
Because you can reach more people with SMS than any app. Not everyone has the latest smartphones. I have quite a few parents on teams I coach that still use flip phones. And even those who do don't really want to be checking unnecessary apps. Text messaging is close to universal so why not use it? Also not everyone has access to data connections at all times and SMS can reach more places more of the time.