Spring Spamfest Meets Mobile Phone Bills
It seems that every year at about this time the annual spring spamfest begins. Why now? All the university business and marketing students are at their summer jobs, and many of them have 'great ideas' about how to market online: forget the wishes of the recipients, forget privacy policies and common sense when you can auto blast hundreds, thousands, millions, forget that a lot of us now use iPhones and Blackberries and other smart mobile devices.
Cool: Email right to our mobiles and tablets where it is likely to get our attention. Especially when we get our next mobile bill and can see how much we get to pay to receive this unsolicited, unwanted advertising.
How bad is it? Here's a short list from just the past 24 hours:
Rogers Communications - And this is something the CRTC should be concerned about. Purchase a mobile phone with data services from Rogers, and they start spamming same phone with data rich advertising. Not only to you get to pay for it, but Rogers gets it both ways: you pay to receive the advertising and they get the direct benefit of helping you churn through your data limits. To push you into post-limit territory - where you pay huge amounts extra for tiny amounts of data and where the profits are measured in the hundreds of percent. This is the same Rogers that crows about how 95 per cent of its mobile customers use very little data. No wonder: they're scared shitless by the ridiculously high data rates. (Canada has one of the most expensive m0bile data regimes IN THE ENTIRE WORLD.)
Delta Hotels - In May, the national media council of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union met at the Delta Halifax for their annual convention. Yesterday, every single one of them who stayed at the host hotel started getting spam - nice, rich media spam that churn though mobile data plans like hot lead through soft flesh. The hotel chain says it was probably just a glitch, or somebody did something wrong by accident. That was when I only knew it was coming to me. Not everybody who stayed there. And I'm guessing not just for the media conference, but throughout the past few months. And in the spam, they have the unmitigated gall to say that the recipients requested to be added to the junk mail list. Despite making it abundantly - at least I did - that the email provided was to be used for one purpose and one purpose only: Confirmation of the registration including terms and conditions.
Eventbrite - This is a US-based online registration system that also harvests the email addresses of the registrants and immediately begins blasting them with direct spam that has nothing to do with the event they registered for, but all about Eventbrite. And, as usual, nice media rich spam that helps your mobile carrier wealthier.
Digital River - This is a payment processing company. One of their clients is Nuance, the company that produces Dragon Naturally Speaking voice-to-text software. According to Nuance, buying software from them through Digital River's payment system means you are requesting relentless rich media junk mail from them.
And that's just the harvest from part of one day, but then the season is still young.
-g
