Oh dear. It seems that Timberland is paying a very high price for spamming it's US-based customers. Timberland has agreed to reimburse people $150 who received unauthorized text messages advertising its products between 2003 and 2008 in one of the first nationwide settlements of its kind, according to a law firm involved in the case.
I knew we had stringent rules on spamming here in the UK. But I guess we don't have the 'class action' culture that exists in the USA. $150 compensation seems rather high when you may only have received one or two text messages.
One of the key differences in the US is that you have to pay to receive SMS still so this will have played its part. I'm also curious as to where Timberland got the mobile numbers from. Were they on a dodgy database or did they just make them up?
So the lesson today is to make sure that you're database is fully opted-in and you make it really easy to opt-out at any time. This is a very expensive lesson to learn.
From my personal experience here in Greece, lots of companies seem to think it's ok to make numbers up, use ranges of numbers, etc. But I'm prety certain that over in our part of the world, this is because, in part people don't know it's illegal, and also incoming SMS messages don't cost mobile owners any money.
ReplyDeleteI've heard people arguing that people won't mind getting an SMS, exactly because it doesn't them anything. What I always tell them is that I will forward just one call of an angry recipient to them, and I am sure that will convince them.
People get so annoyed, I think because mobile is so personal to them, and spam SMS are an invasion of privacy, apart from, well, just spam.