Why tech gets a bad name: new evil abounds

David Pogue has started a new campaign in the US against bogus data charges appearing on users' phone bills (following on from his "Take Back the Beep" rants to get rid of the "instructions" on voicemail which are only there to waste your time and use up free airtime minutes more quickly).

As he quotes in his piece this scam works like so:

“Virtually every bill I get has a couple of erroneous data charges at $1.99 each—yet we download no data.

“Here’s how it works. They configure the phones to have multiple easily hit keystrokes to launch ‘Get it now’ or ‘Mobile Web’—usually a single key like an arrow key. Often we have no idea what key we hit, but up pops one of these screens. The instant you call the function, they charge you the data fee. We cancel these unintended requests as fast as we can hit the End key, but it doesn’t matter; they’ve told me that ANY data–even one kilobyte–is billed as 1MB. The damage is done.

This is outrageous and I have often wondered why they add these short cuts to their phones.

But what is also annoying is that they are deliberately obscuring & corrupting the user experience (which is never that good on a multi-function phone) by having excess buttons that can accidentally be hit in the first place. Or by programming useful buttons with time-wasting, frustrating & expensive diversions.

The iPhone has faults but at least it doesn't have these traps on it.

The full Pogue article is here.