Well, imagine a few situations;

“You are driving in a very populated area where every minute some one is either trying to get under your car/bike or over your car/bike and all of a sudden your mobile phone beep starts. You think this must be the address you have been trying to reach from past one hour sent by your friend. You just push the break, escape a narrow accident and eagerly unlock your cell phone and read the message. To your utter surprise it is your carrier telling you that now you can download some new ringtones from their site.”

If that’s not enough, here is another scenario,

“you were up all night finishing off the project/paper/assignment with remote class/team mates and were dead tired after submitting that and nothing seemed better than a good 3 hour morning sleep at 6:00 am and you were just so close when all of a sudden the beep buzz in to scare the hell out of you thinking may be there were some problem with your submission, with trembling hands you try to unlock your cellphone, but put the wrong code, you try again and this time you are in, you press the read message and spontaneously thank Allah that it was not your greatest fear come true but a message again from your carrier about their new way to exhaust your mobile balance.

So how do you feel about it when you get a wrong message at a very wrong time? Do you get pissed off like me or start saying your prayers that you finally have been able to receive a new message?

BTW, if you are not the one likes to get spam messages either  from carriers themselves or from any advertisers then here are some interesting findings. Most of you guys are probably aware of this shoe company  Timberland but not many of you probably be aware of the class action law suite settlement against them. check this link.The crime was actually being committed in 2003, the company was sued in 2005 by Jeff Weinstein of Chicago and just had the settlement a few months ago.  A huge whooping $7 Million Dollars Fund for everyone who has received a message from them in all these years (2003-2008). That makes at-least $150 for each recipient.  Here are some more details. Pretty interesting?

Now you must be thinking that hey receiving unsolicited/forced sms is not as bad as it may look provided we too have a Jeff Weinstein in Pakistan.

ok, stories apart, tell me do you really like to get such sms. Don’t you think at times they can be pretty annoying and in certain cases can lead to swear accidents. (although you are not supposed to check your sms on the road while driving but well we do that all the time as if this is an adventure as well.)

So what is the role of government in such a case. They did what they are good at. i.e., passed another bill. Here is the cutting regarding the new cyber laws coming directly from the presidency.
You can also check a very hot discussion here on our all time favorite blog of dear Dr. Awab..

Well it is still unknown on how they are actually going to implement it as it has not been put forward in the assembly as of yet and besides I do get local spam  emails every now and then. So there is a lot to be done.

Coming back to the topic, may be that is the reason why the un-wanted SMS, even when the new law clearly points out that you do not send any sms  as well,  are on the rise. people are not afraid of the laws. companies are not afraid of the laws. I remember some time back there was a post on developing a DNC (Do Not Call) list and giving that to the carriers so that people like me could opt-out  from getting any such call but I guess PTA is least botherd about any development in this regard. So I am not sure if there would be much interest in developing and maintaining a DNSMS (Do not SMS) list but at-least what these carriers could do is provide an opt-out way in their messages to give me my freedom back of not receiving any offer from them. The point they are missing is that they are inflicting more damage to their brand then making people use their new services. I for one, would hate and never use such a service and I am sure there must be many more who take their freedom as seriously as they could. SPAM is SPAM in any form. Either it is an email, a phone call or SMS, as long as they do not have explicit conscent by me to receive such messages and as long as they do not provide a clear way to opt-out, this should be considered as a pounishable crime.

And btw, just to mention, if I have to call on their paid number to stop receiving their messages, that’s even bigger nonsense, why on the earth I would like to get charged for a service which i never wanted to have at the first place. These companies have huge budgets at least they can afford to integrate an opt-in and opt-out system with their sms messages so they could at-least give us a feel that they really care about us and not there to bug us with their wrong messages with extremely efficient odd timing.

PS: Did anyone actually ever take a look at any form you fill up while you get a new sim? I mean, back then, I did not but I am not sure if they have any thing related to receiving of messages in that form or in their terms and conditions.

PS2: I intentionally have not added spam messages sent by individual advertisers. Sure they also bug but their frequency is very limited and in most of the case they offer some thing better than a new ring tone.

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