- Target:
- Consumer Protection Board, NCC, NASS
- Region:
- Nigeria
Telecom/Mobile Spam is fast becoming a distressing phenomenon in Nigeria. In case you are lost, please refer to the fact that without consideration for customer privacy and in flagrant violation of ANTISPAM best practices, Mobile Network operators in connivance with advertisers and promoters of all sorts daily intrude upon the privacy of customers with broadcast SMS and IVR jingle-calls, even your ringback tones are hacked with commercials without your knowledge. One wonders where the line ought to be drawn in all this.
You would expect that even without legislation Mobile Network operators ought to adopt or borrow ANTISPAM best practices from similar industries if only to protect their customers and improve the overall service experience but this is not the case. Increasingly one is awakened in the wee hours of the morning by a call which one can only assume to be a distress call from a loved one, only to discover that it is in fact an automated voice call from some advertiser being caller id 4040, 5050 or some number of the sort, not to say anything of hundreds of SMS's that one has to delete and thousands of man-hours lost to distraction from people I do not know selling pro ducts I might not even want tonbuy. For instance, why do I need to get two SMS's every time I check my balance? And since I have started screaming questions, please permit me to add: Who says it is ok to interrupt my calls with a recorded voice telling me I have less than one minute credit time left and essentially eating up the minute? But I digress.
Getting back to point, when can we expect Spamming to stop? No one knows. Except it would appear that things are in fact getting worse. For while in the earlier days you were required to confirm your interest to participate or enroll for a service by texting a value to some designated number, these days very few bother.
Please join us to stop this menace and create a more productive and enjoyable mobile experience for everyone.
We, the undersigned, call upon the Consumer Protection Board (CPB), National Communications Commission (NCC) to eliminate spam calls and SMS’s from our Mobile Networks.
In concrete terms, we need to policies in motion to:
1. Forbid ALL Mobile Spamming. Customers pay for these services. They deserve higher quality of service.
2. Criminalize the arbitrary sharing of customer data by the Networks with third-parties without the permission of Customer.
3. Require Mobile Networks to take measures to protect the privacy of their customers by requiring that mobile advertisers obtain some form of sign-on before targeting them with multicast messages and automated IVR calls. For the sake of emphasis, these rules of privacy and fairness already apply in many other industries.
You can further help this campaign by sponsoring it
The Stop Telecom / Mobile Spam petition to Consumer Protection Board, NCC, NASS was written by avindigh tedd and is in the category Civil Rights at GoPetition.