They’re the bane of every professor’s solemn lecture. Everyone has seen the results of a cell phone- related class interruption: an embarrassed student humbled by an irate professor. Multiple offenses sometimes elicit yelling.
And rightly so. They’re annoying. It doesn’t matter if you downloaded the “Indiana Jones” theme onto your cell phone. The ring always will be annoying.
So students must find a new way to silently and instantly communicate with their friends. Cell phone text-messaging, that staple of bored college students stuck in class with no one to talk to, has just taken off. With text-messaging comes repercussions, though. Not only does it take an irritating amount of time to punch out a message, soon you’ll be able to receive spam text-messages just like you receive spam e-mail.
Currently there are laws preventing the majority of telemarketers from dialing cell phones, but there are no laws to halt spammers from sending e-mail to an address linked to a cell phone. Since most mobile phone carriers charge a subscriber an amount per text message, the result is plenty of worthless, unwanted messages at the expense of the recipient.
Text messaging has been the rage in Japan for several years, and in spite of anti-spam laws and filtering, according to CNN the average cell phone user subscribing to Japan’s largest telecommunications provider receives up to 30 spam messages per day.
That’s a lot of messages.
But before this becomes a plague in our society as it has in Japan, the government must crack down and take preventative steps to ensure our cell phones don’t look like our e-mail accounts. Plenty of people (myself included) receive pages of spam mail every day in their LSU e-mail accounts, and to receive an equally large volume in pricey text messages borders on outrageous.
To find a viable solution we should look to the solutions of the past. The popularity and diffusion of cellular phones has skyrocketed in the past few years. We’re a cell phone nation now. And cell phones are just really getting started here in the United States. Currently, Taiwan has about as many cell phones as it has people, and many people own more than one mobile phone. Imagine the United States in 20 years. A text messaging spam epidemic?
The trend of telemarketers’ practice of calling random numbers was met with resistance within the home. That led to state legislatures creating lists to sign one’s name to so one may be excluded from receiving telemarketers’ calls. The penalties for the telemarketers who violated the law were severe.
This proved to be an effective deterrent. Comprehensive and completely new laws and lists must be drafted. We know the threat is looming, so there is no excuse not to prevent it before it begins.
Besides, it’s bad enough that my e-mail account still suffers the daily tortures of online spam. I don’t want to receive a text message about porn or online pharmacies or Nigerian nationals who need just a bit of my money so they can bring ashore millions of dollars of gold bullion to share with me. Does anyone?