Following the T-Mobile/DBS Datamarketing saga comes a reply:
“…You’re quite right Mr Morris, we do choose these companies to send out our marketing material. We take all the necessary steps to make sure that these companies are reputable and without feedback from people like yourself, we’d be unaware that there was any problems.
“Please be assured that your complaint will be kept on file and we’ll use this information to improve our service…”
Have they learned anything? We’ll see…
Well, my mobile number is Private for one and only reason. That I suppose, when a number is Private, no crappy advertising company has access to it. I have enough stress in my life, to have more added via some ridiculous advertisers, who phone to me usually at the wrong moments, and stressing me up, that something wrong might had happened (e.g. a server is down), while rushing to answer the phone.
You think that’s enough? Then try Greek mobile phone companies. Twice my Private phone number had been leaked to third-party companies, offering me a better mobile than the one I had, plus some crappy useless BS gifts. When I had asked them, how they had obtained a number which isn’t on the public phone lists, thus it supposed to be unknown to them, they said, oh sir, your mobile phone provider had given to us the list. Sure thing … Privacy isn’t something some guys are taking seriously.
Then the guys from the mobile phone provider had learned, so instead of using third party companies for … SPAM, they had started it themselves. Last year it was really a nuisance. Almost each day, around Christmas and New Year’s Eve I was receiving SMSes about the brand new phones I could buy with discount, upon the franchised mobile shops of my provider. I am aware that all mobile phone providers in Greece are doing the same, so there’s little chance of “spam silence” by changing your provider.
But when you are using you mobile phone for emergency issues, thus to be informed when a server is down or waiting an SMS from your doctor for a serious health problem like cancer, SMS spamming is just unacceptable and a serious stress to an already over-stressed nervous system.
Last, but not least. They had decided to make a new credit card offer, for their subscribers, with automated billing payment of my phone bills. Two notes. (a) I hate automated billing payment. I prefer to login to my web banking and paying ’em myself, than applying automated payment and risking to get overcharged for any reason, without being able at least to complain about the wrong charge. (b) Phoning to me at the wrong moments, is a sure reason for not getting what they offer, unless I absolutely needing it.
Now the idiot on the line, who was abusing my mobile and my time at the wrong moments, was asking, “oh sir, it’s a great offer, think about it”. Then I had answered “I am aware that such ‘great offers’ are being ‘broadcast’ in a six months interval, so well may be next year I would pick one but no way right now!”
Advertisers can’t distinguish that when someone has some IQ, it’s useless to start picking his nerves with brand new crap for sale. If he personally needs crap, he can buy it himself.
I totally agree.
Here in the UK we have the Telephone Preference Service where you can add numbers to hopefully stop people calling it, if they access the block list, as all supposedly decent advertisers should. My 10 year old son now has his own pay as you talk mobile which I have registered with the TPS. Maybe it’s because it’s not a contract phone like mine are, but he keeps getting called by unscrupulous firms trying to sell him a contract.