Campaign ads on your cellphone
Cell phones and SMS are now widely used for many purposes. Opportunists find a weapon through cellpones to spread scamming activities, promotional campaigns, and sending many unwanted text messages to defenseless subscribers. On the good side, cell phones and SMS have helped resolved a number of crimes.
With the coming of the May 2007 national elections, campaign ads will add to the “functionality” of your cell phones. The Commission of Elections (COMELEC) has not yet issued guidelines about this so the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) said that they had no choice but to allow the candidates to send campaign ads through short messaging service.
Why text messaging is a potential campaign weapon? Philippines is said to be the “Texting Capital of the World” where an average cell phone user sends at least 8 messages per day. Recent statistics say that there is a total of 43 million cell phone users in the country. Text messages not only comes cheap, it can reach more than 40 million people a day. Candidates can also take advantage of the current promotion, “unlimited texting”, by giant telecommunication companies in the country.
As they are still waiting for the response from the Comelec, NTC said that campaign ads is currently governed by the anti-spam rules, where subscribers need to give their consent before being sent campaign materials through their cell phones and sending text messages is not allowed between 9 PM to 7 AM.
Tell that to Smart and Globe. The opt-out services they offer are useless. You do get the chance to turn off one set of alerts/spam messages, then they send you another set which you have to opt-out again even if you never opted in to begin with. Plus, every message has a charge!
I thought giving sanctions to them is already enough to stop spam text but until now, I still receive a lot of promotional text messages from SMART. Sucks!