Thursday 3 January 2008

Do you trust mobile phone services online?

After a shocking mobile phone bill resulting from the Christmas period, I decided to embrace an idea suggested to me about using free SMS txting services on the Interblag.

google.com.au had a few sponsored results and there are a bunch that are highly ranked. I followed the first seven to ten links and didn't opt for any of them. If it wasn't the incessant flashing images then it was the verbose and entrapping terms of service that promised to spam your phone and email and take your first born child.

I simply couldn't trust them not to spam me and every person I happened to txt from their site. Some of them were even quite upfront about selling on your email address to spam/advertising groups. You can't even choose not to participate because they will suspend your account if you do that. Is that even legal? Where is the ACCC?

Having worked for a company that was also an SMS aggregator, I know it costs them about 2c for each message. The sites that allow you 100 messages a day are only paying $2 for that, if you end up actually sending all those messages. What they must make for sending out spam to your email and phone would be huge.

The guys who ran a spam company near where I worked in Canberra drove very expensive cars so purely based on that, I assume that if you have no conscience then you can make a bucket load of money doing this kind of stuff.

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