Well, being a Nokia fan, the news I read about Nokia being fined for sending spam made me say, “wow” and “come on.” It is true that Nokia, as nearly all smartphone manufacturers, is entangled by already traditional court battles. But being fined this way for sending spam to customers is news of another sort.
The main actor here was the Australian Communications and Media Authority, which fined Nokia $58.000 for sending messages considered to be spam. The messages were intended as advice to customers for using their handsets with better productivity, but it appears that this was viewed also as indirect marketing by Nokia. Moreover, there was no way to unsubscribe from the incoming messages, so we should admit this may have created a real nuisance situation for many Nokia customers. Richard Bean, who is the chairman of the mentioned state body said, “Some businesses are still not getting SMS marketing right. The same rules apply to SMS marketing as for email marketing, and the same rules apply to all businesses, big and small.”
Anyway, the Finnish company did not make much noise from this. It stopped the messaging and agreed to train its employees as to the legal requirements existing in Australia. In addition, Nokia states that the problem concerned its older models, and that the new devices offer the possibility of unsubscribing from the “evil” messages.
