Wed 27 Dec 2006
Some cell phones let you view a few websites and call this “browsing the internet”. Some of them let you go to any site and it’ll pull the text only out of it , but that the exception to the rule. We’ve all heard that cell phones were going to start carrying adverts. Evidently no cell phone company wanted to be the first one to do it.
After all, that would just show little you respect your paying subscribers. The people you were already making a fortune off of. It would tell all potential new customers just how greedy you were. They would know that cell phone company is so greedy that it would sell you out for a few pennies (per cell phone) more profit on top of the hundreds of dollars in profit they make of you every year.
So should I tell you now? Not yet I wanna give you a couple hints first:
- This company is so good at being evil they somehow didn’t get caught up in the scandal were certain phone companies let the Feds tap and record every single call on the network, listen for keywords and/or patterns and then listening with a human to the ones they felt like. You know the one the President even said “might” be illegal. They avoided this scandal even after they came out with a twisted non-denial after the story broke.
- This company was also at the forefront of the push for anti-net-neutrality legislation. That’s where they plan to censor the internet by only providing good service to web sites that pay them whatever fee they want, and charging unpayable fees to sites they don’t like.
- It’s a company that won’t hire people if they have a common name or ever had any credit trouble or been convicted of serious crimes, like misdemeanors (o wait misdemeanors aren’t serious crimes, o well too bad for Americans who want jobs, I guess the jobs will have to overseas since Americans aren’t qualified).
- This company also bribed legislators (whoops they call it political campaign donations), to pass a law that allows them to sell cable-like television services without having to negotiate with the communities for licenses. Which means they also get out of the whole “must somehow provide a service to the community rule” Serve, smerve they say!
- This is the same company whose abuse report e-mails don’t work. Effectively banning all forms of reporting people on their network who spam, threaten people with death because they didn’t like what they said in a forum, use the internet to deface web sites, perform denial of service attacks on web sites and such. Why not make the e-mail address return a no such e-mail address error, they aren’t going to do anything about it anyway.
- This is a company that uses sales tactics like bill stuffing for their business partners, boy are they surprised a few months after they buy an ad in the phone book! They sure make them sorry they ever did that.
- This is a company that performs bill-stuffing on it’s phone customers too
- This company sometimes sends out past due notices to customer with current accounts (and of course, charge late fees, reinstate fees etc fees), just for fun evidently
- This is a company that tries to pretend DSL is as fast as cable
- This is a company that won’t tell you the price of an ad in the phone book, they have to send a salesman. Of course right,because the salesman are the only one who know how much things cost right?
- IF you buy DSL with this company they will install spyware on your computer. Of course they don’t call it that, but it’s difficult to remove and connects to the internet when you don’t think it’s running and sends some kind of data to somewhere.
- This companys privacy policy says they will share your personal information with anyone who is a “marketing partner” and any company whom they feel they need to in order to perform business.
- If you order DSL from them, you will be charged for it for at least a year, even if your phone lines can’t accept it.
- Sometimes this company will use this trick on people who cannot have DSL without rewiring their house “your phone wire could not be tested for DSL until your billing information was in “the system”. Guess what happens when your “billing information (the main part being your CC number)
- This company disables “Blue-tooth” on their phones because you might use it to share files with other Blue-tooth users
- This company sells “unlimited” broadband wireless internet access cards, by unlimited they mean less than a certain amount of bandwidth and only web browsing and e-mail. Anything else is a violation of their TOS and will get your account cancelled and of course you’ll have to pay a steep early termination fee.
- You may not get ringtones, games, java apps for your cell phone from any but this company if you are a cell phone customer. Of course it’s not spelled out anywhere, they just change the phones so it doesn’t work and blame it on the manufacturer.
- Several web sites criticizing this company have already been assigned to slow-lane of the internet even though the slow lane hasn’t even been made yet! (that’s the anti-net-neutrality thing, if you have a web site and don’t pay us whatever custom-fee we charge your site will assigned to the slow-lane, oh and we’re not going to even set a price for you . . .
- This company uses blacklists, and credit reporting as a weapon against it’s customers, employees and the public.
- This company plasters its employees SSN over everything!
- This companys HR department has a separate super secure entrance inside it’s buildings. Hmmmm, why do they feel the need for the extra security ion the HR department?
OK I starting doing a little research for this article and I got overwhelmed by all the stuff I found above. I didn’t think they were that bad when I started this article. I could go on and on with the list, but there’s only so much time and I think you get the point. I’m betting you want to know who this company is.
One last point before I tell you. Industry insiders say that these ads on cell phone only web site are just the start. In the near future they will be using the GPS chip hidden in your phone (you didn’t know they kept track of where you go and store that data, no one knows whatthey do with it either), to serve ads to your cell phone, making it ring, when ever you come close to an advertisers point of business. Isn’t that thoughtful of verizon!
