Friday, October 10, 2008

Reducing mobile phone spam

This PC World article was reprinted in the NYT: Put an end to cell-phone spam., by which they mean text message (SMS) spam.

It's solid. Links to AT&T services that can eliminate email to SMS, abilities to change your SMS identifiers, using spam filtering services, etc.

SMS is a real hack, a billion dollar industry built atop a phone service never intended for human use. Interesting business lesson there.

As a hack it has no defenses at all, and incoming spam costs money.

I think that's why the iPhone team isn't keen to support MMS or SMS -- it's aesthetically revolting and an endless font of costly spam.

So, good advice, but the real solution is to dump SMS.

1 comment:

r.orrison said...

A fine US-centric view. Here in the UK, SMS costs money to send and is free to receive. "Texting" is widely used, cheap compared to calling, and spam is virtually unknown. Is the iPhone designed for the US market, or for the world?