Lately, the spate of spam text messages from companies advertising their products have greatly increased. Back then it was mostly emails that got spammed and text messages were a rarity. Now it’s just so rampant and on a steady increase.
Sometimes I wonder how they got my numbers? Did they meet with me directly? Did I purchase their services or their products and probably filled their forms afterwards without knowing the implications? Off course not!! So how then did they get my numbers? It only points to one thing…..business, Big, Big Business.
Online advertising has become a global billion dollar business since Google and now Facebook revolutionized it. Advertisers are now more than ready to push their products by any means possible even if it means infringing on people privacy. Facebook was caught up in this web sometime last year with accusation they were selling private information of its users. They vehemently denied that. More recently blackberry twitter users got a rude awakening when a popular twitter interface Ubertwitter now Ubersocial was banned. One of the reasons alleged by twitter were “changing the content of users tweets in order to make money”. But then that is the cyber world, what has it got to do with GSM?
Well, the answers could be that people are selling your numbers. Who else would do that if it’s not people who have access to your numbers. My suspicion lies with people who work in GSM companies, especially their engineers. These guys have access to a huge data base of numbers running into millions. Imagine what it will be like to give an advertiser sudden access to a million numbers of people who are sure to receive their messages once pushed. Online advertising agency only make money when adverts are clicked upon. This is because advertisers want to be sure that their target markets are actually reading the contents of their adverts and not just merely looking at them. But with text messages the reading rates are higher. There is a 90% chance that people will read their text messages. For that it’s big business.
Apart from those who work in GSM companies advertisers, brand managers, SMS based companies are sure bet accomplices in this trade which I feel is illegal. It’s a huge business and one people should be wary of. So next time you get a text message from some company don’t be surprised your simply a tool for a new and steady growing market “Commercialized Privacy Transfer Market”!!!!
– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
