SMS texts appear to have become a veritable playing field for ruthless marketers and paid-for services that users just cannot exit.
I still get a lot of SMS texts. I could claim it’s a consequence of some aversion to WhatsApp, or some massive popularity with an older generation of friends.
But it isn’t: it’s actually a result of my inability to master the text equivalent of spam reporting.
I know how to filter and block nuisance callers, and do. They don’t get a second chance.
But SMS technology and phone settings have, in their way, trailed the online world in allowing exit.
One might think it doesn’t matter too much, as SMS texts anyway become an ageing and overtaken technology.
But, actually, there is a very huge financial matter going down in this.
For the limited functionality of SMS text platforms, and the ability to bill our phone time for each commercial text we receive, has made them prey to ethical issues that just do not exist on the Internet.
Indeed, SMS texts appear to have become a veritable playing field for ruthless marketers and paid-for services that users just cannot exit.
I have several. Some I like, and use, and appreciate.
But my bemusement is how we have allowed a regulatory environment where I simply have no control whatsoever over services I never consciously signed up for, or ones that I know how they started, but cannot stop: and I am paying for them.
It’s certain that I would anyway keep a news alert service.
But there are three I object to, and I actually cannot remove. So there they sit, charging me as much as Sh50 or even Sh100 a day, across the three, swallowing up to Sh3,000 a month for products I do not want and cannot stop.
In the online world, by contrast, it is obligatory to provide a notice on every sent item to every user of an exit route. Senders who don’t, and are reported as spam by recipients, get blacklisted.
Reputable mailing services, such as Mail Chimp, or Constant Contacts, or Active Campaign, will freeze the accounts. Unwanted e-mailers don’t get to send out anything after that.
Those same spam reports will automatically see Internet Service Providers mark all mails sent from the senders’ IP address as spam, so that it moves smartly off to the spam bin in most users’ accounts.
But, as the Internet succeeds in stemming unwanted emails, where phone companies cannot do the same for SMS texts, a huge difference stands between these two technologies: the senders of those spam emails never had a way to actually charge us for receiving them.
And there is the issue: for where is the incentive, without clear regulation or any ground swell of public opinion, for Safaricom to equip me to cut my phone bill by Sh3,000 a month? Or a million other consumers just like me.
I have a feeling the phone companies rather appreciate that extra Sh30m, or Sh60m, or Sh90m, as I sit there getting boxed up like a chicken on my phone bill monthly.
Indeed, checking out my phone bill, on a low use month when I am not travelling and roaming, those commercial SMSes can account for almost half of my entire bill.
I guess giving us a clear route to halving our phone bills might be a telco shareholders’ nightmare.
Which is why it’s down to the Communications Authority of Kenya to end this stitch-up.
I don’t doubt there is some way to stop these services. There should be a way that’s clear – as a consumer right, for so long as we are deemed the decision-makers on our own spending.
As it is, elsewhere, a simple STOP reply works. But I tried that for some companies, got a menu offering me Yes or No to subscribe, pressed No, and Safaricom welcomed me to my subscription. There was no STOP for me and my bill.
So stop stitching us up telcos, and make sure we are able to determine what SMS services we actually want, and will pay for.
PAYE Tax Calculator
Note: The results are not exact but very close to the actual.
